I think that my ideal museum job would be something that would be behind the scenes, so nothing related to customer service or having to talk to a lot of people. That still leaves me with quite a few options to choose from. From there, I have a couple of jobs that we learned about in the module that stuck out to me from the others; curator, conservator, preparator, archivist, and registrars. From the list, it’s kind of obvious that the jobs that appealed to me are the ones that are more about taking care of exhibits or logging information.
Curators really appealed to me because I do enjoy learning about specific topics and learning about other aspects of those topics. For curators, it’s the learning aspect of the job that really interests me, and makes the job seem really interesting.
Conservators and preparators probably appealed to me the most because it’s about repairing and preparing objects for museums. I really enjoy putting together stuff and fixing things, so these jobs and the line of work that they involve is really appealing to someone who enjoys those kinds of things. I also am really good at copying art, both in style and color, so I think that I would be a pretty good art restorer, which in a museum environment, I think falls under conservator/preparator. As I said earlier, I also enjoy fixing things and putting things back together, which I relate to the kinds of things that conservators and preparators do (I might be wrong in that assumption, and am sorry if that is true), which I why either of these professions are the most appealing to me.
Finally, the final set of jobs that appealed to me were the archivist and registrar jobs. These jobs also appealed to me because I, in a weird way, enjoying putting things back into a system, or adding things into a spot that has a place and it makes sense. I associate these jobs to the one thing that I can think of and have experience in, and that’s library work, and libraries have a system for where books are placed, and it makes sense to me, so I associate archivist and registrars to, like, librarians of museums.
Question: Did you have any overlap in the museum jobs that you wanted or thought were interesting?
Hi Arianna!
Curators are so cool and the job seems a lot of fun to be honest! I’m thinking about either curation or archiving for my career choice as well. To answer your question, I think curation and archiving do overlap quite a bit. Both deal with artifacts and preservation but curators are more of presentation while archivist are more organization. Awesome post!
Yes, I found that many of my interest intersect as they relate to museum jobs. I would be happy with doing anything honestly. They could give me a mop and bucket to clean the floors in the dinosaur exhibit and I’d be as happy as a child in a candy store. The archivist and conservator jobs are the most fascinating because I like watching and learning about the process of restoring and preserving art.
Ariana, I also thought conservation would be a totally cool job. If you’re in Fairbanks during the weekend of February 25 (next weekend) you should come meet some real-life conservators working on Bus 142! We’ll be sharing their work in the High Bay at the Engineering Building on campus from 11-3:00 as part of the CEM open house. Conservators need a lot of chemistry and art classes – they’re a special kind of museum professional who use both sides of their brains!
I have always been drawn to the back-of-house jobs, though I occasionally really enjoy working in the “open fishbowl lab” kind of presentation where we bring items from the labs and do our work out in the public space. Especially in research-based museums like ours, many members of the public don’t know what we do on a regular basis so even taking a laptop upstairs to show how we catalog objects can be so enlightening!
When I first started at UAMN back in 1996 I worked in the ethnology & history lab, then one summer I worked for the education department as an “Explainer” (giving short free talks to the public on certain subjects), and Visitor Services by circulating in the galleries to clean the exhibit cases and talk to the visitors. The next summer I worked for the exhibits department, preparing for the incoming Yup’ik mask exhibit. Doing all those jobs really helped me understand how the collections departments work with the more public-facing departments to achieve the mission of the museum.