What's Next?

As of about noon last Thursday, March 30th, our exhibit was finished. We managed to make it through a week of power tools, successes and failures, extreme stress, and 10 crazy personalities bouncing off each other. Through it all, we managed to work together and see A Question of History: Public History in Illinois through to completion. Even though we've spent some time this past week basking in the glow of finally completing our exhibit, my classmates and I have had some time to reflect on the next steps. These include doing summative evaluation to figure out what we can improve on our exhibit, as well as beginning exhibit programming. Cayla Wagner did a fantastic job yesterday at her genealogy event, Finding Yourself: Using Archives to Research Your Family Genealogy, as she taught us all how to dig a little deeper into our family history while keeping everyone entertained with

stories of her own family. To continue the tradition of shameless plugs, I'd like to remind all you blog readers that we've got two more events coming up, a speech by Illinois State Museum Director Mike Wiant on Monday April 10th and a guided exhibit tour conducted by myself and Hailey Paige on Wednesday the 12th.

However, the days following the exhibit opening gave me the opportunity to reflect on next steps of a different sort. As I type this, seven of the ten of us have internships in place for when we leave EIU. On Thursday at the opening, Dr. Sam Wheeler gave an inspiring speech talking about the challenges museum professionals will face and providing advice for meeting them. Over the next two days, my classmates and I met with dozens of alumni of the program at social events and discussed ideas with them at the annual symposium. It was at this time that it struck me as it never has before that we are the future generation of museum professionals. To some of you, that might sound a bit daunting. To others, quite honestly, it might sound cheesy, but as a born and raised Wisconsinite cheese is something I've never shied away from. My classmates and I are the current class, the latest in that illustrious line of EIU alumni we met that work all sorts of jobs in museums all over the country. As I said, the idea is a bit daunting. However, on Saturday afternoon I saw some of my classmates stand up among all the alumni and volunteer to work to fix some of the problems we're facing. There will be challenges, but it is a privilege to join these people as part of the next generation, and I think we're up to the task.