Why Working at a Science Museum is Awesome

There are a number of colleges in Syracuse, NY, and they are a great source of workers, volunteers, and interns for the Museum.  In fact, I'm not sure what we would do without them.  But one of my favorite interactions with the students is when Syracuse University's Museum Studies graduate class comes to visit.  Each year a group of roughly 30 students visits the museum for a tour and question and answer session with some of our staff.  I really enjoy their visits.  I love sharing what it is like to be an informal science educator (hence the blog), and listening to the kinds of questions the students have.  I also like feeling that I am helping. Reading books and blogs is good, but getting to ask working professionals about their lives is much better.  The times I have gotten to do this have been very rewarding (check last blog entry), and I hope these students are getting as much out of the opportunity as they can.

So what kind of questions do the students and their teacher ask us?  They want to know about our backgrounds, what a normal workday is like, how the interaction between Curator and Education Department work, and what it is that we like best about our jobs.  Maybe I'll get to all of these on later blogs, but for now I would like to focus on just one question.

What is my favorite thing about my job?

I wouldn't have this job if I didn't love teaching, but I think my favorite thing about specifically being an informal science educator may be the freedom.  The freedom to be creative, to ask questions, to have flexible hours (sometimes), to follow my interests, and to bring together my diverse passions.  I love that I'm not confined to a cubicle, and that the office I share with the other educators is a place of ideas, collaboration, and playfulness.  I love that every week brings new experiences that never stop challenging me.  I love that I spent some days at my office, others in the planetarium, and still more traveling the county and beyond teaching audiences about science.   I love the freedom to attend conferences and meet interesting people.  I love that I am respected at work by my co-workers and the guests.  I love that I have a job that will never get boring, where my ideas are listened to, and my effort recognized.

I understand I didn't really pick one favorite thing, but hey, can you blame me?

What kind of a job would you like to have?

Here are some links about working at a museum.
Benefits of Working at a Museum
So You Want to Work in a Museum
Why I Love Working at the National Museum of Natural History

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Reading Online Museum Reviews

If you work at a science museum, nature center, zoo, etc. I recommend reading through the reviews your guests post online.  Be prepared for both the positive, the negative, and the strange.

Travel advice sites like Trip Advisor and Google Reviews are great places to learn about what your visitors are really thinking.  Sure, every place has a comment card or book for visitors to put there thoughts, but my experience with these is that visitor's leave very limited constructive feedback.  Usually people only scribble off a few words like "Awesome, Awesome, Awesome" (well I guess that's one word three times) or they write long angry messages that make their visit seem so dramatically terrible that it is hard to take them seriously.

Online reviewers can sometimes be as extreme as the people who write out the long angry letters, but most online accounts seem written by people who want to honestly share what they experienced, and they often give examples of the good and bad.  Reading details about their experiences can be really helpful, but sometimes their examples can be tricky too.  Two reviewers might mention the same thing, but one uses it as a positive example and the other uses it as a negative one.

Here is what I mean:

Positive:  "It was great to go to a zoo that was affordable and walk-able in a couple hours.  What a perfect trip for an afternoon."
Negative:  This zoo is so small that I walked the whole thing in 2 hours.  Don't waste your time or money on this.  There is a bigger zoo a couple hours from here. Go there instead.  I'll never support this zoo again."

Positive:  "Museum is located downtown, so there was plenty of on-street parking with credit card friendly meters and lots of places to eat for lunch.  The kids loved all the hands-on exhibits, and I loved reading all the accompanying explanations.  What a great museum for all ages."
Negative: "Museum is located downtown, so of course parking is a nightmare.  Also, the museum doesn't have a real cafe, only vending machines so you have to leave the museum if you want to eat.  Also, all the exhibits seemed too old for the kids at the museum, because they seemed to be running around and grabbing everything."

These are just two examples of many more that I could give.  So if reviews are so contradictory, how do you interpret them.  When I read them, what pops out is the expectations of the reviewers.  It reminds me of the saying how different all our perceptions are.  I think it is impossible to please everyone, and especially hard to please someone who is having a no good, horrible, terrible, very bad day.  But as museum staff, we can use these reviews to see if there is anything we could be doing to better align peoples expectations with what they can actually experience.

We need to be careful about how we word our advertisements and program descriptions.  I once made the mistake of describing a program I was giving as good for "all ages."  Of course, after the show a mother came up to me disappointed because she thought it wasn't good for her 3 year old.  She was right, and I'll never make that mistake again.

As an educator I think my opportunities to help with this mostly come from listening to visitors and helping them understand why things are the way they are.  I try to make visitors comfortable enough to share their positive and negative criticisms and express my appreciation when they do.  And, if it is appropriate, I try to get across just how much our staff and volunteers care about what we do and how hard we work to create a safe and enjoyable learning experience for our visitors.

Oh, and one more way that reading online reviews of museums can be helpful to you is to read reviews of other museums.  Do visitors say the same things about the other museums as they do about yours?  Is your museum missing something everyone liked at the other one?

If you find any particularly interesting online museum reviews, I'd love to see them linked to or posted on here.