After the Interlude: My Story Continued

Omen or not, driving to Peterborough from Edmonton during the week of Katrina, watching the gas prices steadily and sharply rise each day, was a minor adventure and a foot in the door of my dreams.  I'll let you be the judge of whether that metaphor works.  Anyway, what can I say about the Fleming College, Museum Management and Curatorship program?  It was an amazingly intense program where one of the greatest lessons was in time management, with so many projects on the go, from the various courses with various project partners and project group sizes, it was still hard to believe we fit so much into and accomplished as much as we did in the  months of course work and 4 month internship.  We worked hard and occasionally, on the days and nights I'm able to remember, we played hard, forging some great friendships along the way.  Many of us were quite sad to part company and go off to our various internships at the beginning of summer.  We even had to struggle through on our own while we worked on our final exhibit installation, which was a testament to our great training, for a few weeks during an Ontario college strike.    

Preparing a case borrowed from the Art Gallery of Peterborough

Mount that I helped make for our exhibit

A couple of our text panels intended to give a 1930s impression

Using to local media to publicize our exhibit

Hats for the 1920s

Our opening panel

My date for the grand opening with my 'strike beard'

My 1st foam core text panels for my mini exhibit

Anyway, the MMC program that year had 29 students enrolled and we all stuck it out to the end.  After the initial few weeks we were divided in half and given an exhibit project to work on each.  The one group was given 'The Italian Community of Peterborough' and allowed to use the exhibit space of the Peterborough Centenial Museum and Archives, where we had one of our classrooms away from the college and spent at least half our classroom time.  The other half, which I was in, was given Sadlier House or '751 George Street' to come up with an exhibit for in nearly 8 months of planning by various committees.  We made it easier on ourselves by dividing even further into 3 groups of 5 to work on 3 separate aspects of the exhibit - a little too separate, as it turned out.  We met weekly as a group of 15 to share progress and ideas and to attempt a common vision for the exhibit and had rotating chairpersons for the meetings, every few weeks.  I think that was my contribution, but I don't really want to take specific credit for anything we accomplished as a group. 
I think that's enough writing for tonight.  I'll be back in a couple of days to share the experience of my internship in London at The Royal Canadian Regiment Museum with a few photos again.