Mary Ellen Munley, 48 / EMPLOYER: Field Museum / SALARY RANGE: $60,000 to $100,000
Why did you choose this field?
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I selected working in museum education because I am interested in working with people who enjoy lifelong learning. I’m attracted to doing programming that goes all the way from cradle to grave; that variety is intriguing to me. Museums tend to touch people in very special ways, so working in a place that has that capacity, and coming up with new ways for people to become interested in visiting and enabling them to have experiences they’ll never forget, is a terrific part of this field. We deal with topics that are important to our lives today such as issues about cultural understanding and change, and how people can live together in a city and a world with great diversity. We also introduce people to issues about our natural environment and the role that we all need to play in sustaining this planet.
What is your educational background?
My formal educational training is in social psychology. I was particularly interested in human communication and social science research. I went to undergraduate school at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison and in Milwaukee. Then I did doctoral work at Northwestern in social psychology and communications.
Describe an average week.
Most weeks I work six days a week for a total of 50-70 hours. A fair number of our programs are on weekends and we have evening programs, so my actual schedule can change virtually every week. One of the great things about this job is that there’s a lot of variety. I do many things in a given day. That can include meeting with a prospective donor from a foundation or corporation to explain what we’re doing in our programming and see if they might be interested in becoming a supporter. I might sit in on an exhibition review meeting where we look at the plans for a new exhibit, like the Sue exhibit, and discuss how an exhibit is developing. I might meet with some members of the staff of the education department to discuss what lecture speakers we might bring in next year. I also review budgets for programs. There are also times when we have museum staff who come in from places around the country and around the world, and I introduce them to what we’re doing in education programming and learn about what they are doing. Then every so often, I try and get out to one of the Chicago public schools where the Field Museum has a partnership. Recently, I went to the Piccolo School on the West Side where they were having an assembly program that was the culmination of a learning activity we had done with them about the maps of North and South America.
What is the best thing about the job?
The job affords me the opportunity to be a learner. It’s terrific to have the kinds of people who come to the museum all of the time, to do programs, to have the exhibit topics that we have, so I keep learning all of the time. It’s not just planning things for other people; we get to experience the programs, too, and that’s fabulous.
The worst thing?
The most challenging thing about the job is making the best decisions about which programs to offer. It’s always a challenge to hope that you’re staying in enough touch with people. There are a lot of opportunities for what we can present at the Field Museum. The challenge of making the best choices is staying apace and fresh and not offering so much that it becomes a dizzying amount of programming for the public to see.
What three attributes are essential to doing your job well?
You have to enjoy learning yourself. You have to be someone who is very curious and very broadly interested in things, not too specifically focused. Another thing is that you have to like and respect people. You want to do things that respect people’s intelligence, that respects their desire to know about things without making it too simplified. Third, you have to be able to juggle a lot of things at the same time because we’re constantly planning and presenting programs.
Where will you go from here?
I don’t know. This is the kind of job that a person could stay in pretty happily for some time. I’ve been in the job for about two and one-half years, and it’s too early to know.
What advice would you give to people interested in this area?
In terms of formal education and training, it’s good to have some background in subject matter that relates to whatever kind of museum you would like to work in. It’s also important to have training in understanding and knowing about human development and how people learn–not just traditional school learning, but the variety of ways people learn: How do we teach ourselves to play tennis, how do we learn things from our family members. The other advice I have is to read and participate as fully as you can in the things that are in your community: go to the theater, go to concerts, go to museums, go to the zoo and on nature hikes.
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