Link Sharing

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Recently I've been applying to jobs, and getting emotional about how few of them there are and my chances &c., and then I was thinking I should go for a second, more generalized M.A. or possibly a PhD, and I've come across a decent number of links I wanted to share with those others in the same boat as me.

How to Get A Museum Internship, from the Art History Blog: I have been lucky enough to be a volunteer, unpaid intern, paid intern, and full-fledged hired employee in a lot of different museums–from the very small and specific, to the medium-sized, to the encyclopedic and kinda famous. As I’ve now completely transitioned into supervising interns myself rather than being one, I thought it was high time I write a post about how to go about getting an internship in a museum.(I haven't had that many internships, but this does generally fit with my experience!)


Should You Get A PhD to Work in a History Museum? by Steven Lubar: I talk to many students interested in museum work. They ask about what training they should get for this. My story is pretty straight now. For better or worse, an MA seems to be necessary to get ahead in the museum world. ... I think that in many cases, a Ph.D. is not only not useful, but actually teaches the wrong things for museum work.

100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School [for a PhD], which is a whole blog.  (It's speaking to a very specific set of people and sort of mixes MAs and PhDs and I don't think it applies across the board, but in general these are very good points.)  There is also a long list of links to similar essays in the sidebar.

No More Plan B, by and Entering graduate students file in. They're nervous, they're eager, they don't know quite what to expect. If the director of graduate studies does the job well, the annual orientation ritual will nourish their anticipation, while allaying their anxieties. Still, out of a sense of responsibility, faculty should keep one source of reasonable trepidation on the table: the job market. It is what it is, and entering students need to enter with their eyes open to it.

And, not related to those, I just found out that the Albany Institute of History and Art is on Pinterest, and the pictures they've posted so far are from Great, Strange, and Rarely Seen, the exhibition that I worked on.  Sadly, they are not the biggest pictures (especially sadly in the case of the fans, which are really detailed - like this cabriolet fan from the 18th century).  Nothing has been posted in months, but maybe some more will come up soon.