The new school year is upon us, almost, and that makes me think of students returning to class in hopes of getting a degree that will eventually get them rewarding, both in the monetary and emotional sense, work. Over this summer events aligned in such a way as to produce two position openings at my institution. As I’ve alluded to in earlier posts, filling those positions can be a challenge. It is not that I don’t get applicants. Aas we all know there are more than enough history, public history, museum studies, MLIS graduates to go around. The key is to find the right fit for the job and the organization.
Because we are a small institution, we cannot afford to hire someone who needs on-the -job training. We need someone who can come in and “hit the ground running,” as they say. That means I look for evidence on resumes and cover letters of experience in the field. On my mental checklist, education is one of the first things I look for and that is pretty standard and straight forward. Either you have the degree(s) necessary or you don’t. The next thing I look at is what kind of experience does the candidate have?
When I was a student I used to think, how can an employer expect a person new to a profession to have experience if they haven’t had a job yet? It seemed to be a Catch-22 kind of situation. But then the concept of internships was foreign in my world of history departments. From what I’ve been hearing, it hasn’t changed all that much. Sure there are teaching assistantships, an opportunity and an income source which at some universities is closed to students pursuing public history, but where is the organized effort to encourage and match students with internship opportunities?
My assessment is that since public history is still a relatively new field, and since the majority of faculty members in history departments are trained in the traditional way, with the emphasis on teaching assistantships, research, writing and publishing, as the way to succeed in the field, the importance of internships is under emphasized. Talking with young professionals in the field I’ve found that even though they matriculated in a public history program, they got very little if any guidance on where to look for or how to get an internship. When I teach an introduction to public history course, in addition to divulging the myriad of diverse uses for a history degree I encourage internships as a necessity. Actually, encourage is probably not the right word. I repeat in every class meeting, as the proverbial broken record, that internships, ideally more than one, are the way to not just find out what aspect of public history suits them but to gain the experience needed to eventually get a job.
So what can we do? Public history programs, and history departments in general, need to become more visible in the communities where they are located. In particular, relationships need to be developed between academia and the museums, libraries, archives and other sites where internship opportunities are likely to be found. This could be done by simply reaching out to the local history consortium and inviting its members to a “let’s get to know each other” event. Though I also think there needs to be some alteration in thinking in history departments themselves. Yes, the scholarly pursuit of history is important and needed but we all know not every history major can, or will even want to, get a job in academia. Those students need to be served as well. After all, the work of public historians creates the bridge between the ivory tower and the masses.