Curators of the Future: Summary

It's been a fun day at the careers fair today. I've done a lot of talking about museums and a lot of teaching kids how to use a hobby horse. And enjoying the looks on their faces when I introduced them to the smell of carbolic soap.

"That's what history smells like, kids."

This is just a short summary whilst it's fresh in my head. If anyone else out there gets asked to do a careers fair for young people, hopefully this will be helpful for you.

Things that went well

We took museum objects to play show-and-tell with, and they went down very well. From the hobby horses to the washboard, the objects were a great talking point for all the kids from the real little ones all the way up to the 14 year olds. Watching 14 year olds ride hobby horses around a sports hall is at once hilarious and slightly terrifying.

Some kids are clearly there to get as many leaflets as they can possibly manage, so I was glad of the shortened version of the events programme that I'd printed out. The small papers on the web resources went down well too.

Things I'd do differently

We took two boxes of craft materials to make things with the younger children and didn't end up using any of it. They came around in groups of eight or ten and only stayed a couple of minutes, so making anything at all was rather impractical.

Some of the other stalls had stickers, badges, bags and other freebies. Big things are obviously not in the budget for small museums, but a few hundred button badges would have gone down a storm and wouldn't have cost all that much.

Things I overheard

Being a museum, I guess we have a lot of stereotypes that people associate with us. I heard one boy say in a rather derisive tone "a museum? What sort of a job would you have at a museum?".

It wasn't all doom and gloom though. We had a few people who specifically wanted to know about museum working; a few historians and a couple of archaeologists and one palaeontologist.

When I grow up I want to be...

I've asked a lot of children today what they want to be when they grow up. When I've got all the data tabulated I'll share (and of course I'm still hoping for more contributions from everyone out there!) but for now here are my favourites from today's fair;

Boy, 13yrs - "I'm not sure. I always used to say I wanted to be a Teletubby." 
Girl, 7yrs - "I want to be lots of things. I want to be a dancer and a singer and a film maker and a pilot."
Boy, 12yrs - "I want to be Doctor Who, but I don't think he exists, so I guess a policeman instead."