Introduction

Originally, I was not a Museum Studies major. I came to RIT in 2013 as a sophomore. My freshman year was spent at Ithaca College where I was a film major concentrating in screenwriting with a minor in psychology. My love for film only last a semester and my love for Egypt, archaeology, and anthropology took over leading me into my first Museum Studies class at Ithaca. I loved the course and decided to transfer to RIT. My interests in Egypt and archaeology have been with me since I was a small child, maybe 4 or 5 years old. The program here allowed me to branch out into other areas such as art, exhibition design, and curation just to name a few but never found a passion in any of these areas. I took Tablet to Tablet in Spring 2014 which is taught at the Cary Collection as is about the History of the Book, and finally I found my passion in the field. I am now using the skills I learned in that class and doing my thesis on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. 

Title Page of Hypnerotomachia Poliphi (1499) from Columbia University

I have some experience with museums. My first internship was at the Rochester Museum and Science Center in the summer of 2015 (so last summer). I worked in the collections department where I was working with metadata and assigning objects accession numbers.

That same summer I interned at the Macedon Public Library (my hometown's local library) in what we call the Bullis Room, which is just a rare book room from the Bullis Family. All the books are have fire and water damage because of the fire that destroyed the original library in 2001. At this internship I had to inventory the books that were in the room and compare it to the list of books that predated the fire. I also had to check to see if the books were on the OWL (Ontario - Wayne Libraries) system. I was also given the chance to curate my own exhibit. In two months I researched and pulled materials for my exhibit, Sherlock Holmes: A Classical Detective for the Modern Age. 

The poster for my Sherlock Holmes Exhibit. 

My last internship was over this summer. I interned at the RIT Archives. My project was to create a Pinterest page for the Archives. I had the input of the summer staff and I created boards from the collections found in the Archives. I am still working on the page as part of my job and I'm training my co-workers on Pinterest so the page will stay active for the time being. Check us out here: https://www.pinterest.com/RITArchives/