I feel your pain, as I am also looking at joining the same job market a few years from now. I'm going to grad school for museum studies first though. Hopefully that will help a bit... I'm planning to work with archaeological collections though, not the educational side.
Liz, Best of all possible luck on your future job hunt. I will encourage you to get as much experience while you further your education as possible. I haven't been looking directly at jobs based on working with museum collections, but every other job I've seen is pretty hardcore about preferring experience (lots of it) to higher education. Education can never hurt, of course, and from what I hear, you'll have a hard time getting hired to work with collections without having some extensive schooling for conservation techniques.
I'll be very interested to find out where you go after school and what you'll be doing. Keep in touch.
I'm actually interning in the archaeological collections department at the Florida Natural History Museum this Fall, and will hopefully continue working there during the Spring semester (I graduate in December, but will spend the next semester waiting to hear from grad schools).
So I'll have a year of working with collections under my belt before going to grad school, and I'll definitely be trying my hardest to continue working in local museums before graduating with my Masters. Darn job market!
Good luck to you as well... I will be certainly joining that list-serv!
I just got an e-mail through MuseumList (subscribe if you haven't yet; I love it) about a job posting for collections managment at Mt Vernon. Not sure if you'd consider working with historic collections, rather than archaeology, but this sort of thing crops up on the mailing list frequently.
I'm so sorry it's been hell for you to get in. It's been pretty tricky down here too. I just recently found out that out of my $800 a month salary, I have to pay $125 a month for insurance, Americorps doesn't cover that. And then that plan doesn't cover any pre-existing condition, which means each month, I have to buy a bottle of pills out of pocket that costs $300. That leaves me with a wopping $375 a month for rent and food and anything else that comes up. My mom and I are working on finding me other insurance, but in the meantime, there was some weeping. Add to that, I just found out Harvard requires a year of calculus for admission but doesn't (like all other medical schools) accept AP credit to fulfill that requirement. They say I should drop my job and take calculus at a University, while ofcourse still demonstrating impecable community service dedication. I'm looking for night classes at community colleges, but apparently community colleges don't expect poor adults looking for continuing education to want to take
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Best of all possible luck on your future job hunt. I will encourage you to get as much experience while you further your education as possible. I haven't been looking directly at jobs based on working with museum collections, but every other job I've seen is pretty hardcore about preferring experience (lots of it) to higher education. Education can never hurt, of course, and from what I hear, you'll have a hard time getting hired to work with collections without having some extensive schooling for conservation techniques.
I'll be very interested to find out where you go after school and what you'll be doing. Keep in touch.
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So I'll have a year of working with collections under my belt before going to grad school, and I'll definitely be trying my hardest to continue working in local museums before graduating with my Masters. Darn job market!
Good luck to you as well... I will be certainly joining that list-serv!
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