Museology students and alumni were out in full force at this year’s American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. AAM is a national professional organization for individuals working in museums, and their annual meeting is the largest gathering of museum professionals in the world, with over 4,200 attendees this year. The theme of this year’s conference was around diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion in museums, and the passion for this topic was palpable. While the scale of this conference can feel overwhelming, it provides a great opportunity for our students and alumni to meet other museum professionals with similar interests, share their own work with a national audience, and scope out new ideas and opportunities from other institutions that can propel their career forward.
We had 23 students who attended the conference this year, supported through our conference scholarship program, and almost as many alumni (at least the ones that I happened to run into). While a few of our students told me that this fact was often received by others attending the conference with comments such as, “You guys are everywhere!” it was fantastic to see so many familiar faces who were involved in the museum community.
Our students and alumni were active contributors to the conference. Thirteen of our students and two alumni presented their research and projects in the Emerging Innovators Forum, examining everything from how museums respond to governmental budget cuts to 3D printing techniques for replicas and storage mounts. Class of 2017 student Elizabeth Wessells helped to organize this year’s Excellence in Label Writing Competition that was presented at the conference. We also had several alumni present during panel presentations, including Rebecca Harmsen and Valerie Johnson who presented on how museums portray war in museums, Kelley Staab who talked about her role in planning and evaluating pop culture programming at the St. Louis Science Center, and Brian Carter presenting about dealing with failure in a museum.
As museum professionals who encourage free-choice learning and play, we had to make some time for fun and exploration! We took some opportunities to explore some of St. Louis. A highlight for our students was the City Museum, where they crawled around this found object playground-installation. My personal favorite was going out to see some live music at BB’s, one of St. Louis’s most well-known blues clubs. While these trips weren’t part of the conference, they provided some moments of relaxation and time to process everything we were absorbing at the conference.
At the end of the day, it was really the people we surrounded ourselves with that made the difference. Our students were able to connect with some of the museum professionals whose work they have been following, or meeting face-to-face with people that were involved in their thesis research. We had over 30 people attend our alumni-student happy hour, which reinforced how strong our UW Museology community is. I am proud to see the ways that our students and alumni are contributing to the conversations our field is having about the future of museums.
–Dylan High, Museology Student Experience Coordinator
