Museums and Society > Opportunities

The program in Museums and Society connects students to experience during and after their time at Johns Hopkins. Resources start with opportunities for internships and research, and then full-time positions or graduate school.

How does Museums and Society prepare me for professional success?

Museums and Society builds core durable skills that are in high demand in both the private and public sector and offers you opportunities to apply these in professional settings. 

According to studies by the non-partisan America Succeeds group (which scraped data from U.S. job postings for over 1.5 million companies), these are the skills most frequently requested by employers (Bolded skills are 4.7 times more requested than top technical skills) and how they relate to program curriculum.

  • Communication
    • Practice communicating complex ideas successfully to public audiences in a wide variety of formats from public talks to exhibitions, websites, video, learning booklets and other media 
  • Collaboration
    • Practicum courses are built around applied projects that students work on collaboratively and design in partnership with local culture and memory keepers.
  • Creativity & Problem Solving
    • Conceptualizing and implementing multi-disciplinary public projects that mobilize objects and collections to explain, interpret and present culture, the past, and science for public audiences require creativity and applying a problem-based learning cycle to new situations.
  • Critical Thinking
    • Evaluating how museums, libraries and archives shape and are shaped by the societies of which they are a part and
    • Analyzing how things accrue and/or change meaning over time as part of new contexts and collections require students to gather and assess relevant information; identify patterns; question assumptions; and draw well-reasoned conclusions.
  • Self-Directed Learning
    • Working on long-term applied projects across the course of a semester require organization, meeting professional deadlines, self-evaluation, and autonomy, all signs of self-direction. 
  • Intercultural Fluency
    • Museums’ diverse collections offer ideal opportunities for engaging with and navigating cultural differences.  

What kinds of jobs are alumni doing?

So many! Here is just a very small sampling:

  • Copyright attorney at the Library of Congress
  • Associate Curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
  • Consultant at McKinsey
  • Senior Exhibit Coordinator at G&A Design Services Firm in New York
  • Director of Programs at Antiquities Coalition
  • Public school teacher in Baltimore City
  • Associate Director of Creative Technology at MAS experience design studio
  • Heritage Preservation Grants Associate for the State of Minnesota
  • Museum Educator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
  • Editor, Capital Projects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
  • Archivist at the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum
  • Director of Operations and Marketing at Maryland Nonprofits
  • Assistant Vice President and Business Director at Sotheby’s

Interested in graduate school?

The Krieger School’s Advanced Academic Programs offers an online MA in museum studies for professionals in the field.

The Smithsonian maintains a directory of undergraduate and graduate programs in museum studies and related fields such as archival science, conservation, etc., organized by state and country.