Changes Ahead

After a little over two years, today I stepped down as the editor and main writer at the Tufts Museum Studies Blog.

I founded the blog in the fall of 2010 after pitching some ideas to Cynthia Robinson, director of the Tufts Museum Studies program, about digital collaboration and community. How to provide a consistent touchstone for a program that encompassed so much diversity in its student population? The idea of a blog filled some of Cynthia's hopes for communications tools, including a page to post up-to-the-minute job announcements, and so it was created. I'm grateful to Cynthia for her trust and her advice over the years in working with the blog.

I'd been blogging on and off personally for a long time, but this was a new adventure, and an incredible learning process for me. Some of the things I tried didn't work; some worked very well. After graduating from the program, it was clear to me that I needed a good succession plan, and I'm happy to say that my friend and former colleague Phillippa Pitts, a current student in Art History & Museum Studies at Tufts, is taking over the blog. She's going to do an amazing job with it.

I'll be contributing occasional posts, which I'll cross-link here, and I have my eye on a few museum projects that I have carefully left on the back burner until now. Onward!

Tufts Museum Studies

Last night, I attended the orientation for incoming Tufts University Museum Studies students. I graduated from the program with an MA in History & Museum Studies in May 2012, and have been very involved in promoting it pretty much from day 1. I edit (for a little while longer, anyway) the Tufts Museum Studies blog, have spoken at past info sessions about the program, and last night got the chance to introduce myself to a small group of incoming students as a mentor. I also recently authored the Tufts University overview post on the AAM Emerging Museum Professionals blog.

It's an interesting feeling, being "senior" enough to be considered a mentor, but I really enjoyed interacting with the incoming students. Tufts always gets a great mix of enthusiastic just-out-of-college young people as well as midlife career changers. The mix adds a lot to the program.

I also enjoyed connecting with recent graduates that I was in classes with but haven't touched base with in some time. Some are doing utterly fabulous things in their new institutions, and others have moved on to exciting graduate programs in disciplines like historic preservation, which dovetail nicely with a museum studies certificate. I know networking is often used as a dirty word, but I love it. Museum people are my kind of people, and any excuse to spend more time with them is a welcome one for me!