What are the job responsibilities of a museum curator?

Museum curator, how to become? ?

• I live in virginia, and would like to know the "plan of study" to beoming a museum curator or similar a job in a history-oriented setting.

• Answer:

  First of all, a museum curator is a management position. So, get a degree in management so that you have skills that are applicable in regular higher-paying jobs than in the history field. It also wouldn't hurt to have an advance degree in a history or archaeology field, but its not as important as being a good manager type. The way not to do it is to get an advance degree in some field of history, try advancing within a position, until you are second in command to an aging dying curator. You will be just about there, the person will die or retire and the board of directors of the museum will go out and hire some young wise-*** management person who doesn't know a thing about the field. Another possibility is to get really rich doing something totally different, and then start your own museum as a way to "give back" to the community. Yet, another thing you can do is to go into some regular business, and start pulling stuff out of the trashcan. 30 years of this and you will become your institution's historian. Unless you are fired, in which case, you still have good dumpster-diving skills that can serve you in good stead in the outside world.