Jump-start your career
Whether you’ve been working in museums for years or have just started exploring the possibility of working in museums, we hope you’ll find the following resources helpful.
Interested in working in museums but not sure where to start or where to go from here?
Our graduate advisor is always happy to help you get oriented, whether you’re already planning to apply to our program or just stumbled upon this page and didn’t know our program existed until now. We hope the resources below will be helpful, but please don’t hesitate to schedule a conversation with our graduate advisor below.
Tips for exploring museum career pathways
Exploring and understanding a field as broad and diverse as the museum field can be intimidating. But no matter where you live, you almost certainly have what you need to start your career exploration locally, whether through volunteering,* internships, employment, visiting and attending programs, or seeking informational interviews (see the “Talk to people…” section below). A couple of tips to help you get started:
Think broadly about what a ‘museum’ is
The first hurdle you may need to overcome is your own thinking about what kinds of museums you’re interested in working in. While you may have a specific type of institution in mind (say, an art museum, or a natural history museum), one of the best things you can do to enhance your opportunities for learning is to be flexible about the kinds of institution you might profit from learning about. You may even think beyond museums specifically; art galleries, community-based arts/culture and heritage nonprofits, and local history societies often need plenty of help and can provide great opportunities to get hands-on experience supporting exactly the kinds of work that museums aspire to do (sometimes more successfully than museums do).
Be flexible about the kind of work you’re willing to do
You may dream of being a curator or executive director, but everyone’s got to start somewhere. Of course, you should seek out opportunities to get involved in ways that genuinely interest you, but be open to taking on volunteer, internship or employee roles that aren’t exactly what you had in mind when you first thought about working in museums.
Be patient… and persistent
Developing an understanding of such a broad and diverse field is not an easy or quick process; you may find it takes you many years to feel like you have a good sense of the range of institution types and job opportunities out there, and where your interests lay amongst them. Graduate school can certainly help condense some of that journey into a more compact time frame, but it’s still in a sense only a beginning. If you’re at the true beginning point of just starting to explore whether the museum field and a museum studies graduate degree are a good fit for you, it may take a couple years of consistent effort to find opportunities to gain experience in the field, talk to professionals to better understand their work, and affirm whether the field (and a graduate degree like ours) is the best fit for you.
At the end of the day, graduate school is a major investment, and not one to be made lightly. A museum studies master’s degree is by no means a pre-requisite for a career in the museum field. While we obviously feel there’s great value in our degree, we encourage applicants to apply because of the intrinsic value of the experiences that make up our program (courses, internships, thesis, networking and mentorship…), not because they have the impression that they absolutely need the credential to get where they want to go (spoiler alert: you probably don’t).
*A note about volunteering and volunteerism in the museum field: as evidenced by the existence of our paid internship program, the museum field is one that has historically depended upon unpaid labor in the form of volunteering and internships (or at least certain segments of the field have). We think this is a problem, and that’s why we developed our paid internship program. At the same time, the reality for you as an emerging museum professional will be that volunteering and internships are one of the best ways to develop your understanding of the field. If you’re someone who has limited spare time because you work full-time (or more than full-time) and/or have significant familial or other obligations, you may still be able to find opportunities to contribute fairly minimal amounts of time to volunteering. Even volunteering one time for a particular event may be a way to make connections with museum staff, who can then help you get connected to other opportunities to get involved or connected with other museum professionals.
One of the best ways to gain a better understanding of the museum field also happens to be a great way to grow your professional network. Through informational interviews (also referred to as ‘career conversations‘), you can get valuable insight into the wide range of job opportunities in the museum field. While you can learn more about informational interviews via the links below (and via Google), the basic idea is that you ask a museum professional to chat with you so you can learn what it is they do, how they got to be doing it, what they like about their job and what’s challenging, and what advice they have for someone like yourself who might be interested in getting into the field.
Who to Ask for an Informational Interview
While it’s a good idea to leverage your existing network to connect with potential interviewees, you might be surprised how willing many museum professionals are to share their experience in order to help out an emerging museum professional like yourself. It can’t hurt to email someone you have no pre-existing connection with based solely upon the fact that they have a job title that sounds cool at an institution you love! (And don’t let it deter you from emailing a few more people if you don’t hear back from the first few people you reach out to…)
Note: in the museum field, it’s really important to try and talk to many people, not just one. Aim to learn from people working at wildly different types of institutions and different types of roles. While you’ll find certain key terms occurring in job titles across institutions (e.g., education, interpretation, exhibits, collections management), the ways in which these general terms translate to day-to-day work can vary significantly. You may find the word curator in job titles at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and your local historical society, yet the jobs themselves may be worlds apart in detail.
One more pro tip: LinkedIn is a great place to search for museum professionals who might be willing to chat with you; if someone’s active on LinkedIn, that shows that they’re excited about engaging with others in the field.
Some Informational Interview Resources
UW Bothell Career Services: Career Conversations
The Muse: How to Ask for an Informational Interview (and Get a “Yes”)
A great place to start (and return to throughout) your exploration of careers in the museum field is with professional associations like the American Alliance of Museums, the Western Museums Association, and the Washington Museum Association. Associations like these provide conferences and other networking and professional development opportunities as well as resource libraries.
The latter examples above are specific to our program’s location, but no matter where you’re located you’ll find similar organizations. You may also find local professional communities focused on particular museum practice, like education, collections management, evaluation, grant writing, etc.
Here are a few other national associations that offer resources potentially of relevance to emerging museum professionals:
American Association for State and Local History
Association of Children’s Museums
National Art Education Association
Association for Art Museum Interpretation
Association of Science & Technology Centers
Association of Zoos & Aquariums