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"What I have been up to since graduating has been very much connected to my American Studies training at Smith. As you know, I am now a second year fellow in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, sponsored by the Winterthur Museum and the University of Delaware. The core of the program is its interdisciplinary nature, and I have very much benefited from an undergraduate interdisciplinary program that taught me how to synthesize information from different types of sources and disciplines. Most importantly for me, I was first introduced to the study of material culture while at Smith. I worked at the Genesee Country Museum near Rochester during the summers between my freshman and sophomore years at Smith, which I thought, was a lot of fun, but never really thought about pursuing a career in museums. I applied for the American Studies Smithsonian Program both to take a break from campus for a while and to pursue what museum work was all about a little more. My semester in Washington DC in the American Studies Program really altered my thinking about what I wanted to do in the future. I had originally thought I was going to teach history, at the secondary or college level, but I became fascinated by the idea of museums as educational institutions and their ability to reach people of many ages. When I returned to Smith, I took Ken Hafertepe's class on the Material Culture of New England held at Deerfield. So few undergraduate programs offer any classes on, or opportunities to work with material culture, but Smith provided me with both. I also credit Smith with helping me to get my first job after graduation. The summer after my junior year I was able to volunteer as a curatorial intern at Strong Museum in Rochester through a grant I had received as part of Smith's Summer Internship funding. Working for free was not an option to me that summer, and I would not have been able to be at Strong if it wasn't for Smith's financial assistance. Through that internship, I was hired as the museum's curatorial assistant directly after graduation in 1997. I worked there for just over a year before leaving to begin graduate study, and it was a wonderful time: I got a break from school which I needed, but at the same time, I was gaining much needed experience in the field I had determined to go into. My museum experience at the Smithsonian, as well as at Strong, were crucial to my being accepted into the Winterthur Program, which has an extremely competitive admission process that strongly favors applicants with museum experience. My interdisciplinary academic training at Smith was also critical to my acceptance though, as I had acquired a broad background in the humanities, including History, English and Sociology, which has proven helpful at Winterthur. I am also grateful for having had the opportunity to do an honors thesis at Smith. That experience of doing a long term, independent research project, and synthesizing my research onto paper, prepared me for graduate school. I am now working on my Master's thesis, and feel much more confident about the whole process having gone through it before. I am working on a property located in the Southern Tier of Western New York, in Allegheny County. The area was first owned and settled by Philip Church, who was Alexander Hamilton's nephew, and he built an impressive stone and brick mansion on the bank of the Genesee River between 1807 and 1810. The house and some of its original outbuildings and furnishings still survive, which forms my evidence base. I am primarily interested in the Church family's attempt to create a very genteel lifestyle for themselves while living on what was then the frontier. It is difficult for me at this point to see past the thesis, but when it is completed next spring, I will be graduating from the Winterthur Program and be looking for a curatorial position in a museum working with a historical collection. My interdisciplinary training in the American Studies department at Smith has therefore proven to be a crucial part of my professional path. I gained so much more from it than if I had pursued a more traditional history background. The Smith American Studies Program taught me to think broadly about American culture, which is a crucial skill in the museum field." |
