Gallery and Museum Administration

What did I learn?

Museum governance
Museum management
Communication
Museum operations, planning, and leadership
Project management
Museum math
Financial management
Marketing
Revenue generation
Branding
Facility management

The budget group I was in for the class exhibit

For each of these topics, we went into depth about why they’re important in museums, but to identify the skills and information. We would then improve upon and develop those skills in class. For things like budgeting, we would learn the math skills necessary for it so we could see where the money museums needed would go. With management, we had to learn what went into managing things for projects, along with bookkeeping and budgeting.

What did I do?

Networking in different professional and social settings
Blog posts
Write a report on mission statements and museum policies
Create a Gantt chart
Doing an exhibit management project
Math and financial management exercises
Working with excel
Make a grant profile

These assignments allowed us to make more connections and better understand the class topics. For the Gantt chart, we saw how the chart can be useful when working with a team when the project has multiple parts to it. For the exhibit management project, I was put into the budget group. Here we help to divide the budget we received for the different exhibit groups based on the budget recommendations they gave us. From there, we collected all the receipts that the groups got after purchasing items, and we formed a checkout system for the cash and visa cards so we knew what they were purchasing. This way, we could try to stay on budget for the whole project, and ensure that not one was overspending.