Alumni Jobs - Museums and Galleries

This post begins a series with information about positions that department alumni hold in many different fields. 

 

This first one is about a 2002 alumna who is now employed at a museum in Illinois.

 

 

 

 

Candace Summers graduated in 2002 with a BA in Archaeology and minors in History and Art History. She worked at Angel Mounds State Historic Site for a year and then went to grad school at Illinois State University in Normal, IL. She received her MA in History in 2006. During that time Candace was the Public Programs Intern at the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington, IL. While working on her MA (and after completing an internship), Candace started working part time at the Museum as the Sunday Coordinator and Assistant Educator in the fall of 2005. In Jun 2006 she was hired full time as the Education Program Coordinator and then was promoted to Director of Education in September 2007 and has served in that capacity ever  since.

 

Most of the educational programs that come out of the Museum go through Candace’s department. From school programs at the Museum, exhibit programs, the annual History Careers Day Camp in the summer (which features a whole day about Archaeology!) to outreach in the community, her department helps to educate about 14,000 people of all ages per year. Their mid-size museum focuses on Illinois and McLean County, IL history. They have 15 full and part-time employees and over 240 volunteers. Their signature event, dear to Candace’s heart, is their Evergreen Cemetery Walk, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2014!

Check out their website (and like them on Facebook) to learn more about this fabulous institution: www.mchistory.org

The picture here is of Candace during History Careers Day Camp in 2014. Each day of the camp (5 days long) features a different career using the field of History. She is giving a group of campers a behind-the-scenes tour of her Museum (this photo is from the Small Artifact Storage room) during Museum Studies day. 

 

The History Careers Day Camp is entering its 12^th and Candace is very proud to say that she has been helping students learn about careers in the field of history for 11 of those 12 years.

 

 

Melanie Miller ('12) at the First Division Museum

Life the year after graduation is filled with great expectations as well as disappointments, and several curveballs. My summer after graduation started out exactly as I wanted: excavating several ancient Maya sites in Belize and gallivanting across Central and North America. Then I returned from my post-graduation honeymoon and had a long-delayed appointment with reality. I was near broke, living at home, and frantically searching for an archaeology-related job to no avail. Practicality arising from a desperate need for cash flow forced me to widen my job-search net landing me in the world of retail. After being offered positions in everything from hardware to eye-care to electronics, I finally ended up as a sales consultant for cell phones at Best Buy Mobile. Many of you who know me will find great irony in this: the girl with the brick flip phone who just got texting this past summer and is one of the least tech-savvy people when it comes to smartphones now makes much of her living from selling phones.

I still wanted to do something that was archaeology or museum related so I decided that if no paid positions were open, then volunteering was the best avenue. I quickly discovered that unlike requests for paying jobs, people rarely turn down the offer of free labor and respond to your inquiries much faster. I chose to volunteer at a local war museum, the First Division Museum at Cantigny Park, where I helped in the digitization of hundreds of original documents and artifacts from WWI to the Iraq War. After volunteering over 50 hours in four months’ time, the museum encouraged me to apply for a paid internship position in the archives department. This was rather unexpected, but it proves that just getting your foot in the door can lead to greater opportunities. I have been working as an intern since February and am in charge of cataloguing and reorganizing thousands of documents and artifacts from a donation that fills 25 teetering banker’s boxes. The challenge I face now is balancing three jobs, as I still work at Best Buy and consistently babysit, which makes for a few twelve-hour work days and work weeks of nearly 60 hours. I am also studying for the GRE, which I am set to take next month. The best advice I can give on that is to take the GRE as early as possible so it is not looming over you!

Although my life mostly consists of work, study, and sleep when there is time, I can already see the benefits of my hard work. Clearly, the internship is one of them, but the money I saved from working three jobs is allowing me the opportunity to participate in another archaeological dig this summer, the Jezreel Expedition. This fall I will apply to grad schools for Mesoamerican archaeology while continuing to work. In short, while life after graduation may find you living back at home with a non-archaeology-related job, do not worry or give up. Instead, concentrate on preparing for grad school, save the money you earn for something to strengthen your archaeology resume such as field schools or conferences, and stay involved in something archaeology related, whether it is a class or volunteering, to help prevent you from losing focus or desire to go back to school for archaeology. And for those moments when you feel discouraged, sit back, drink a root beer, and watch the fourth Indiana Jones movie to reinvigorate your fervor to educate the public that aliens have nothing to do with archaeology and to put on your fedora once again.

2012 Graduate Rachel Lawrence at Dickson Mounds and beyond

I started working for a retail company in May almost immediately after graduating, and I have the majority of my loans paid back.  My goal when I graduated was to work long enough to pay those loans and get a financial cushion before I continued in graduate school, and I will hopefully be returning to academia next year.  I have tried to stay in the archaeological field by volunteering at Dickson Mounds in Lewiston, Illinois, and I have staffed big events and we are working on more in this upcoming spring and summer.  Even though it is not paid work, I still feel like I am part of the staff there, and I really enjoy working with visitors, young and old, on Native American craft projects and archaeology-related topics and activities.  For example, not long after I learned how to use it successfully, I taught some visitors how to throw a dart with an atlatl. 

Between work and Dickson Mounds, I continue to revise my research project on Vlad the Impaler.  In December 2012, a conference published the revised edition of the paper I presented, and I have continued to revise and expand not only that but also my undergraduate thesis.  I would like to make Vlad part of my career, as has been my goal for almost twelve years (I am not joking), so I have kept up with the research and I am planning a trip to Romania either this fall or next year.  In the meantime, I'll just keep working.

Graduate Rachel Lawrence Interns in Illinois

I volunteer at the Peoria Historical Society in Peoria, IL, where I have been designing a virtual exhibit that supplements the new museum in Peoria and the Smithsonian.  I planned everything from formatting to information to images.  In addition to that, I catalog artifacts in our collection, including items from the arrival of the French in the mid-17th century to photographs and books.

I also have just started an internship at Dickson Mounds Museum near Lewiston, IL.  In September I was one of two archaeologists to lead their "Be an Archaeologist for a Day" program where fifteen students from the ages of 10-12 participated.  Now, I am helping to plan some of their events for October and November as well as learning to lead tours and other group activities.

Archaeology students dig at New Harmony, IN

USI's excavation at New Harmony has been featured on the local news.  UE archaeology majors Lydia Maurice and Alyssa Reynolds are participating in the excavation this season.  Check it out!

Alumna Profile: Dani R. ('08) in Hungary and Chicago

At the completion of my first year as a graduate student in the Anthropology PhD program at the University of Illinois-Chicago, I was invited to participate in the analyses of Copper Age skeletons and grave goods from the Great Hungarian Plain. The intent of this project was to perform a bio-distance study to determine how closely related people were across the Plain. As the Plain was a major path for migration from Asia to Europe, we wanted to see how this migration might have impacted the genetic makeup of the Plain’s peoples. We analyzed over 250 skeletons from 9 cemeteries around the Plain and concentrated on identifying genetic dental traits that could statistically indicate genetic similarities or differences. We also made sure to sex and age the skeletons and we will keep that in consideration when interpreting the material. This summer was spent gathering the information, whereas the upcoming months will focus on carrying out the statistics and the interpretations of the data.

Participating in this project has exposed me to a variety of scientific techniques, facilities (museums and universities), and researchers (American and Hungarian), all of which will aid in my own research in the coming years. However, I would not be where I am today without a strong foundational education in archaeology, which I received at the University of Evansville. I specifically chose UE because it focused on Old World Archaeology, a rarity in the States, and I have never regretted my decision. The continual support from the faculty, both during my years as a student there and after, has helped me to be where I am today and for that I am grateful.

Alumna Profile: Lisa D. ('08) at Illinois State U.

After graduating from UE in 2008, I was admitted into the MA program in Historical Archaeology at Illinois State University. In addition to taking graduate classes, I held a graduate assistantship, which is a great way to earn some cash, get to know the professors, and get some experience within the archaeology world. During the summer of 2009, I participated in a graduate field school in western Tennessee, where I was able to work with the Cherokee (I am on the left in this photo, which was taken at the field school).

This past summer, I worked in Cape Krusenstern, Alaska as a student research aide for the University of Washington. I learned right off the bat that there are plenty of jobs out there if you are willing to work hard and you don’t care where you live. Also, it doesn’t hurt to have some contacts. Now I am finishing writing my thesis as well as trying to find a part-time job for the time being. I hope to graduate in December 2010 and find a full-time job with a museum or the National Park Service in archaeological interpretation.

Student Rachel Lawrence at Kampsville, IL

This summer I spent three weeks excavating The Buried Gardens of Kampsville (TBGOK) in Illinois. It is a 2,000-year-old Middle Woodland site, dating between 50 BCE and 400 CE. Our excavations began at 8:30 am when we drove out to the site and ended around 4 pm. Occasionally we would be rained out, and a lab session would replace field work; on other days the heat index rose so high that we would only excavate in the morning. We also had evening labs consisting of washing and tabulating artifacts, or attending lectures on topics such as osteology. For the first week, we were given our own 2m x 1m unit, and we were eventually moved around to other units. I was later put in the Midden Pit, where I discovered, with my unit partner, a large concentration of pottery sherds that were photographed for the official report.

Because this was my first excavation – and the first for many of the other excavators – the supervisors of the site showed us how to use the trowels and worked with us individually on special techniques like digging through the clay with shovels. Most of what we found consisted of flakes and small pottery sherds, but we also found charcoal, clumps of burnt soil, lamellar blade fragments, scrapers, trade materials, larger pottery sherds, and animal bones, as well as the ever-present limestone and chunks of chert. I learned that limestone helps to preserve bone and shell, and in my final week in the Midden Pit my unit partner and I found 14 diagnostic shells (with hinges).

The bonds everyone formed were incredible. We lived in a dorm-like setting, so all of us grew close. Everyone had different stories about excavating, traveling to different countries and other experiences. It was sad to leave but the knowledge and experience I gained, as well as the contacts I made, will help me as I continue my career in archaeology.

Rachel is a junior Archaeology and History double major at UE.

Alumna Profile: Stephanie B. F. ('04) in Chicago

Stephanie writes about her experiences after graduating from UE in 2004.

My double major in Art History and Archaeology from UE led to a wealth of opportunities in non-profit, research-oriented work at art museums and libraries. Following my graduation from UE in 2004, I entered the graduate program in Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I completed the MA in 2007 and was awarded an academic year internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC for the 2007-2008 academic year. At the National Gallery, I worked in the Department of Image Collections, part of the institution’s art library, and the Adult Education department, the branch of the Department of Education that managed lectures, organized study weekends, and coordinated the museum’s highly competitive fellowship and internship programs. Upon completing my internship, I worked as a graduate intern in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago and then obtained a job there as a visual resources cataloger in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, a position that built on my work in Image Collections at the National Gallery.

Today, I am Program Assistant and Spotlight Exhibitions Coordinator at the Newberry Library, a research library whose vast collections of books, manuscripts, genealogical materials, and maps focus on early modern Europe, the Americas, and the Midwest. I am half of a two-person department that manages the Library’s public lecture schedule, runs an adult education program that offers over 150 seminars each year, and oversees the Library’s two exhibit galleries. As Spotlight Exhibition Coordinator, I manage the production, installation, and de-installation of our ongoing Spotlight Exhibition series, working together with curators and conservators to produce focused exhibits that highlight treasures from the Newberry’s collections. I am also enrolled in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University and will earn my MLIS degree in 2013, with a specialty in academic libraries, particularly art libraries, and archives. This degree will build on my work at the National Gallery, the Art Institute, and the Newberry and will complement my MA in Art History. In the next five years, I hope to gain more experience working in art libraries or archives and plan to pursue a PhD in Italian art and architectural history.

Student Alexandra Cutler at Kincaid Mounds, IL

Alexandra (second from left) at Kincaid Mounds

When I arrived at Kincaid Mounds, my excavation experience consisted of digging flower beds in my mother’s garden. I had just finished my freshman year at UE and had never attended an archaeological field school. While the various terms and techniques from my class notes were still fresh in my mind, I was eager to put them into practice and make them tangible, especially at such an interesting site. Kincaid is a Native American burial ground from the Mississippian period located about an hour away from SIUC, the field school’s sponsor, in Carbondale, IL. During the four weeks I spent there, I feel that I learned more than I had in my entire life. It also reinforced everything I had already learned in my first year of college. In addition to lab time, our crew arrived on site at 7 am sharp every Monday through Thursday morning and worked on the remains of a burned communal structure until 4 pm; every Friday was a half-day. The hours were long and hot but filled with plumb bobs, trowels, and total stations – all tools I had previously never heard of but gradually learned to use under our TAs’ careful instruction. My style was soon established: I always managed to dig a couple of centimeters deeper than the prescribed measure, but my screening and troweling skills weren’t too shabby. The treasures that resulted at the end of each day justified all the hard work: daub, potsherds, flakes, points, charcoal, and – on the very last day! – two large, nearly whole animal effigy pots. After freak storms, countless sunburns, and daily sing-alongs, we left with bonds as deep as the units we dug and an experience that will benefit our careers in archaeology for a lifetime.

Alexandra is a sophomore Archaeology and Creative Writing major at UE.
To learn more about Kincaid Mounds State Historic Site, click here.