Archivists, Curators, and Museum Technicians

My interview was over phone. I believe that The Met is looking for passionate folks who are truly interested in the museum experience. I would advise you to be your genuine self and explain why you want to work in a museum. What do you want to learn? How do you hope to use the experience in infor...

The MuSe internship runs during the summer. I commuted into NYC from the suburbs, which was about an hour each way. I normally left my house around 8am and got home between 6pm and 7pm depending on traffic (for buses) and train delays. As I wasn’t taking any summer courses at the time, I found th...

The MuSE Internship Program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art allows interns to work in one of many departments in the museum. For my internship, I worked in The Watson Library at The Met, but other interns worked in curatorial departments, the education department, development, the archives, ret...

The training program is a rigid month of learning the ins and outs of the museum in order to construct your tour. You will thoroughly learn about most of the halls in the museum while learning vital public speaking skills and spending an ample amount of time synthesizing this information in order...

I recommend going to the museum before your interview and taking some time to explore so you can talk about aspects that make you think or got you excited. As with any interview, be prepared to talk about why you want to work at NMAJH specifically. For this position, a large part of the applicati...

Every morning I would greet the security staff and head upstairs to get a cup of coffee from the communal office kitchen. Once at my desk, I would work on various projects including reading interview transcripts and summarizing them in preparation for a future technology exhibit, researching vari...

There are a few things you can do to prepare for an interview. Firstly, make sure you are familiar with the past few years of exhibitions at the museum. What types of art or movements is the museum focusing on? Before your interview, visit the museum to see the exhibitions that are currently on v...

I had the fortune of doing a bunch of different things while at the Hirshhorn. My principle responsibilities were research and writing. My supervisor would give me the name of an artist or exhibition and a research question, and I would use the Smithsonian's resources to compile a packet of infor...

Working in a curatorial department is very different than working and learning in an academic department. The goals, concerns, and work methods are all different.But, having the content knowledge from classes, understanding the vocabulary associated with art history, and being experienced in the ...

Depends a lot on who you're working for and what shows are coming up! You'll probably be going to the Clark's research library frequently, so you'll have an awesome opportunity to learn a lot about the theme of whatever shows might be coming up. You potentially may be asked to help with miscellan...

History absolutely prepared me for this job; having a historical background gave me a lot of context for dealing with the objects and exhibitions that I encountered in the museums. Museum Studies helped quite a bit too; it gave me fundamental knowledge of how everything in a museum worked, the be...

The day to day tasks can vary a lot depending on the projects being worked on. Daily tasks included fixing, barcoding and imaging mounted plant specimens, entering plant data into a database, and filing away specimens in the herbarium library.

To start with I would know basic costume history. Be able to clearly talk about trends throughout the years and how we see dress change.Know how to preserve historical garments and how to maintain them. For example, storing them in special paper to keep them from braking down. What you can hang o...

It depends on the day.Working in the archive can range from photographing garments and uploading them to an online database to mending garments to pulling garments for an event.Working the gallery is hours during the week that you watch the exhibit and make sure no one touches the garments or bri...

I would recommend going through the museum's website, reading up on their most recent exhibitions. This will help you to be in the loop when the time comes to speak about yourself as a potential member of the curatorial (or any!) department. That being said, do not expect to be tested on your kno...

It depends! When I was there, the department was working on the Laura Owens retrospective, which was a big show with lots of moving parts. I worked on organizing their database, preparing acquisition proposals, building models of exhibition space, making power points for meetings--which is kind o...

My interview was over phone. I believe that The Met is looking for passionate folks who are truly interested in the museum experience. I would advise you to be your genuine self and explain why you want to work in a museum. What do you want to learn? How do you hope to use the experience in infor...

The MuSe internship runs during the summer. I commuted into NYC from the suburbs, which was about an hour each way. I normally left my house around 8am and got home between 6pm and 7pm depending on traffic (for buses) and train delays. As I wasn’t taking any summer courses at the time, I found th...

The MuSE Internship Program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art allows interns to work in one of many departments in the museum. For my internship, I worked in The Watson Library at The Met, but other interns worked in curatorial departments, the education department, development, the archives, ret...

My interview was over phone. I believe that The Met is looking for passionate folks who are truly interested in the museum experience. I would advise you to be your genuine self and explain why you want to work in a museum. What do you want to learn? How do you hope to use the experience in infor...

The MuSe internship runs during the summer. I commuted into NYC from the suburbs, which was about an hour each way. I normally left my house around 8am and got home between 6pm and 7pm depending on traffic (for buses) and train delays. As I wasn’t taking any summer courses at the time, I found th...

The MuSE Internship Program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art allows interns to work in one of many departments in the museum. For my internship, I worked in The Watson Library at The Met, but other interns worked in curatorial departments, the education department, development, the archives, ret...

In a regular shift you get to man the front desk and greet and direct visitors as they come in, and you get to roam the galleries to keep an eye on things and be available when visitors have questions. When things aren’t busy, you can read or work on homework. Cell phones and gum are not allowed....

My interview was over phone. I believe that The Met is looking for passionate folks who are truly interested in the museum experience. I would advise you to be your genuine self and explain why you want to work in a museum. What do you want to learn? How do you hope to use the experience in infor...

The MuSe internship runs during the summer. I commuted into NYC from the suburbs, which was about an hour each way. I normally left my house around 8am and got home between 6pm and 7pm depending on traffic (for buses) and train delays. As I wasn’t taking any summer courses at the time, I found th...

The MuSE Internship Program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art allows interns to work in one of many departments in the museum. For my internship, I worked in The Watson Library at The Met, but other interns worked in curatorial departments, the education department, development, the archives, ret...

My interview was over phone. I believe that The Met is looking for passionate folks who are truly interested in the museum experience. I would advise you to be your genuine self and explain why you want to work in a museum. What do you want to learn? How do you hope to use the experience in infor...

The MuSe internship runs during the summer. I commuted into NYC from the suburbs, which was about an hour each way. I normally left my house around 8am and got home between 6pm and 7pm depending on traffic (for buses) and train delays. As I wasn’t taking any summer courses at the time, I found th...

The MuSE Internship Program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art allows interns to work in one of many departments in the museum. For my internship, I worked in The Watson Library at The Met, but other interns worked in curatorial departments, the education department, development, the archives, ret...

Familiarize yourself with some basic history and functions of the American Legion and it helps to research basic information on the specific post, too. I would say as long as your proficient in understanding the basics in archiving/digital archives you will be fine. However, if you have never had...

The typical day is relatively flexible. The digital archivist is usually allowed to come in at their own time. Coming in earlier in the day (around 9am) ensures a quieter work space before the post opens. At the post individuals will go through materials located in a storage room and begin the pr...

Different days vary, but our usual duties include opening and identifying boxes of well core samples, entering their data into our inventory, pulling stored boxes, paleo reports and other data for clients, assisting our volunteers in labeling and packaging the samples, and general cleaning around...

Thanks so much for that question, pretty nice one. It's pretty easy and tough and the same time. The interview turn around your leadership, your networking and your commitment. You should demonstrate your ability to lead a community and to bring change, you should convince your ability to bring p...

A curator in Kinshasa is always a challenging life, first of all, I would say that the hard part of a curator is before the investiture. The community vote for you based on your agenda. It means that before to run for the post, you should work hard to find a project and agenda. After that, your l...

The days varied depending on the project that we were working on at the time. For the first project, which was determining habitat sutability for the Endangered Species The Dakota Skipper Butterfly, we were doing frame transepts. A typical day would be getting up at 5:30am eating breakfast and pa...

This job was very specific to a project. I did basic maintenance to cassette decks used to play back 25 year old master tapes and digitized them using Adobe Audition software. While doing so I listened to create Library of Congress subject and name headings to be used for internal search, as well...

The key to this interview is showing that you have a passion for history broadly and Pittsburgh history specifically. If you can show the interviewers that you 1) know something about their collections (their website is great for this), 2) Pittsburgh's history (try the Heinz History Center or the...

The Archives offer a great opportunity for both self-directed and collaborative work. Part of your day will be spent talking to archivists and other student workers about archival techniques and your plans for processing a collection (say the records of a University department or famous PA or nat...