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Volunteering Provides Insights for Career Choices

Volunteers at the BlantonVolunteers at the Blanton have a variety of opportunities to see first-hand what it takes to run an art museum. Currently, there are nearly 60 university students from UT and other Austin-area colleges and universities who are exploring options for museum careers by helping us operate the Blanton on a daily basis. If museum work is something that interests you, spending time at the Blanton will help you learn what our various departments do, what individual staff members work on, and how it all comes together for an exhibition opening or day-to-day school tours.

Volunteer jobs are often as simple as providing visitors with information or monitoring galleries during parties and events. Even though they are easy to do, we couldn’t run the museum’s programs and events without this extra help. In exchange, volunteers get to experience the programs, events, films, lectures, etc. and learn more about how we do what we do. It’s like having an appointment twice a month to come to the museum and catch up on the latest exhibitions while helping us keep things lively and engaging for various audiences.

One story of a current volunteer involves an early decision to pursue a career as a curator. As a high school student, being a museum curator seemed like a fascinating career journey that would combine complex ideas, travel, visual creativity, administration of projects, and working with high level donors. After several years of helping in various routine jobs around the museum, this volunteer is still at the Blanton and now a junior at UT. After a summer on a Fulbright scholarship to Russia she is back again, this time for a different type of volunteer job. She will be helping in the Prints and Drawings department with research and background work on various works of art and exhibitions. She is one step closer to her dream and also to finding out if this is the career path for her.

FiftyFest_IMG_4812Something great about volunteering that might seem to be a bummer at first glance is finding out you DON’T want to work at a museum. I recently heard from a summer intern who let me know that her experience here was very valuable. She learned about the museum and the various career opportunities in general that a museum offers and decided that these careers were not a perfect fit for her. She says now that it helped her so much to rule those possibilities out of her career journey.   She wrote:

I know it has been a while, but I just wanted to thank you for giving me such a positive internship experience. Although I’ve decided to pursue another career path in art, I really think my time at the Blanton gave me the push towards assessing my professional strengths and interests. Because it was my first internship, I might have been too anxious to really appreciate the time you took to explain things to me. I have had a few more internships since then and have learned that not all places properly mentor their interns let alone engage with them. I know this e-mail seems quite out of the blue, but I’ve just been thinking about my experiences lately and wanted to share some of my thoughts.

Having worked in art museums for over 16 years, I know that I enjoy the culture, staff members and visual stimulation that this environment provides. If you know someone who is considering a museum career, encourage them to spend time in a museum on the other side of the information desk. It will help them to imagine if museums are a good fit for their career or not. Every personality and every set of skills can be utilized at a museum. It’s more about the type of work we do that may stand the test of time and feel like the right fit.

Martha Bradshaw joined the Blanton in 2005, where she has been Manager of Visitor and Volunteer Services for almost ten years. For information about volunteering at the Blanton, email Martha at volunteer@blantonmuseum.org.

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