Hi Jason et. al.
I think everyone on this list has felt exactly the way you do at one point
in their lives, they're just supressing it ;-) I'd like to suggest to Roger
Smith that he put a virtual punching bag on his site...
Since you won't take nothing from nobody, why not look into contract work?
That's how I started, and it gave me the flexibility to supplement my
income, and let me do what I wanted. I asked around at local museums,
telling them what my specialty was (or what extra work they had that
remotely fit my interests), and I was able to get a few jobs out of it. This
gave me tons of experience that I wouldn't have gotten by volunteering, and
kept me happily working WITH museums for 5 years.
Contract work can be just as rough as anything else if you don't do your
homework in understanding how it works, but it can be a very lucrative
alternative to getting nothing from a system that pretty much doesn't work
for 99% of applicants anyways. (1 out of 250 applicants is actually less
than 1%...) I know this is sounding a bit like a "earn $10,000 / week in
your spare time" ad, but if you're good at what you do, word will get
around, and I can pretty much guarantee you will have a lot more choices at
your disposal. Museums always have little bits of extra work to do, but can
never justify a full time position for the work because it's so varied. But
you can take those little bits from a bunch of different museums, and make a
full-time job for yourself. This was sound advice from a prof of mine in my
museum studies program that I've never regretted following.
As for volunteer work, don't do it unless you think you can really learn
something from it, or it brings you enjoyment to do it. As an example, don't
stuff envelopes unless you can also talk them into letting you help them
update their database (thereby learning something about databases). Then
don't update databases unless they also teach you something about creating
databases, etc, etc. Or, um, don't stuff envelopes unless they also let you
ride the carousel! But at any rate, set the volunteer thing up so you give
yourself time to learn what it is you want to learn...
cheers & good luck,
Troy Whitbread
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