Greetings all, from your University Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak — where Fall has notably become the annual season of our remarkable Harvest Supper fundraiser evening gala. All tribute and credit to our beyond hard-working Friends of the Museum Board who organize for months around this evening, and to the Museum staff also who support this event annually. Harvest Supper 2021 was an exceptional joy, and a great success — if you were present, thank you so very much! If not possible for you this year, we’ll keep you fully apprised for October, 2022.
This month I’d like to take a moment to speak of the great meaningfulness to the University Museum and Rowan Oak of our student workers, and the multiple positive impacts they have on us and our audiences. It is unequivocally the case that we could not be the productive and dually campus/community-serving resources that we are, without them. Our students truly transform us in many ways, and much of this is of course not readily apparent on the ‘surface’ for visitors, friends, and members.
Students working at the Museum come in the door by many pathways. Some are interns learning skills under our professional staff mentoring, and many such are now appearing due to the University’s launch of its first-ever Museum Studies Minor in the past academic year. Interns are of course receiving academic credits, while some student workers are paid and earning hourly wages such as those in Visitor Service roles at our front desk — you may have noticed these hospitable undergrads sitting behind our Admission Desk on a daily basis.
For many years now we have had ‘traditions’ of Classics students undertaking project-based internships with the Greek & Roman Antiquities collections under Curator and Collections Managers’ supervision, and analogously School of Education undergrads have assumed roles with our Curator of Education for program support such as the after-school Art Zones and the summer Art Camps (plus many others). Relatedness to a student’s own academic and research interests is of course a best case mentoring and skills-building scenario, and another example of such is the Integrated Marketing & Communications (IMC) department sending an intern to work under the guidance of our Communications Coordinator.
Rowan Oak has commonly benefitted from a Graduate Student Assistantship that is co-funded by Southern Studies, Rowan Oak, and the Office of the Provost — often being assigned project-specific initiatives at the house by the Curator and Assistant Curator. The second of our Graduate Student Assistantships is analogously a funding partnership between the School of Education, Museum, and Provost, providing significant 20-hour per week experiences with our Curator of Education. It may go without saying that the annual funding support buy-in of the Provost, the Director of Southern Studies, and the Dean of the School of Education tells us all we may need to know about the academic teaching value of these staff-guided and overseen training experiences.
A closing thought about student employment and student internship outcomes. With a full-time professional staff of 8 at the Museum and 2 at Rowan Oak, the existence of student support labor and project support in such high annual volume permits our productivity to soar. As noted above and quite literally, we would not be the Museum and the national literary heritage site that we are without these talented and dedicated student adjuncts. For staff and I one of the very best experiences of all is when we are asked to provide Letters of Reference for graduate school applications, or employment opportunities in front of our students. We have quite the large number of very successful student ‘alumni’ as it were, off working in arts, culture, or heritage positions or acquiring graduate degree training in fields as diverse as business and law.
Like all museums nationally where daily work takes very publicly visible forms, an equal volume of what we do is the far less apparent. Being a collections-based museum at a Carnegie R1-rated research university, it is not a surprise that we embrace these mentoring and student-supervision roles. The celebration of this here is one of bringing forward for your attention the pride that we have in changing student lives, and opening windows of grad school choice or careers options that likely did not exist before our students came to Oxford to attend this great university.
With sincere regards,
Robert Saarnio
Museum Director
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