I’ve found that reporting weekly has been a great opportunity for reflective practice, and the reexamination of the activity calendar helps me remember what’s happening week-to-week. So many great things happen every day at the museum, that sometimes I feel guilty if I can’t mention everything. This particular blog post is being brought to you by my new found love of an app called PicFrame, and my ability to take better photos with a new camera phone. Since working on this blog, I’ve felt the pressure to upgrade my phone so that I always have a camera on-hand that can take better quality photos, and I’m slowly adjusting to this new found ability (so hopefully-more photos and faster).
One of the first things that I covered with the new phone was our first registered professional development for teachers that was for individuals. We’ve led a number of school-based PD’s, and it was awesome to know that individual teachers would sign-up to visit the Rubin Museum on their own.
This week has also been a Baruch-a-palooza. We welcomed around 70 Baruch College students to listen to a lecture on the differences between non-profit business management and for-profit corporations. Major kudos go to our CFO, Marilena Christodoulou for putting together the presentation and inviting the whole finance team to observe. One of our own staff accountants graduated from Braruch, and is continuing to complete his masters, so it was a great moment for students to see that there are career opportunities in the arts for those who are a bit more “business-minded.”
This class was only the start of a major deluge of Baruch students visiting the museum this week. It was great to see Peer Mentors we taught earlier this semester return with their groups, visiting the galleries, and leading exceptional visits.
This week I was also happy to attend one of our all-Visitor Experience meetings on Friday. The Visitor Experience Team is the largest group in the Education Department, so it’s hard to get everyone together, but we seem to do it 2-3 times a year to plan ahead, and work together on our responsibilities and skills. Aside from the normal reminders about processing family program tickets, we received an awesome drop-in from the Membership Team who wanted to thank us for our work, and we took the time to make some art as a team. Big THANK YOU to Ashley for preparing a great team-building opportunity that allowed every member of the Team to contribute to an individual artwork. When working in an art museum- sometimes it’s important to just- make art!
