I applied for a museum job once. The museum interview was a few days before the interview for my current job and it went horrible. All my carefully planned answers went down the drain once seated in front of the interview panel. I can't explain why I was the nervous, stammering wreck that I was that day compared to a few days later when I breezed through the interview for my first job at the company I work at now. The pop psychologist in me says that I wanted that job more and screwed up the museum one purposely.
Lately I was thinking how different it would have been if it'd been the other way round. Well, there are plenty of ways it would have been different but more importantly I realised that I wouldn't mind working in a museum (especially when I reach that enigmatic, suitable age). Alas, I also realised that I'm not suitably qualified to work in a museum. Sure, I have a more than suitable degree (Archaeology), but that's part of the problem. I only have one degree and most museum curators have some postgraduate qualification. Which got me looking at museum qualifications. Yes, this does exist as a valid degree. You can even get multiple degrees in it!
Just, not in South Africa. Museum studies are not offered at any South African institutions. I knew this already and my first line of inquiry was internationally but was none the less disappointed when double-checking the local universities.
Studying overseas is quite a long-term plan and a convenient way of realising a vague aspiration to live overseas for a bit provided I can scrape together
I emailed the local museum (the national one) and my first volunteer shift was this morning. And yes, I was doing glorified sorting and packing but, man!, did I love it. I'm volunteering in pre-colonial archaeology and it was just marvelous (I reckon my eccentric museum curator would use the word 'marvelous') being surrounded by all the artefacts. The stone tools, the ostrich egg shells, the unidentified fauna fragments. I had a thought that archaeology can be a morbid profession, studying the remnants of someone's life and the items that once gave it meaning.
The store room at the museum is massive and smells like cardboard (the boxes everything is packed in) and dust and is filled with the excavated remains of all those significant archaeological sites that I read about in so many articles but never visited. I even found a few boxes whose contents my old professor dug up.
Even if my long term plan of studying overseas doesn't happen (long term is, well, long and things can change, especially my mind), volunteering at the museum would still be an amazing experience. As I exited through the museum, past the whale exhibition, just shy of the dinosaur one, I felt exhilarated.
Yes, museum, this the start of a beautiful relationship.
