 Hi, everyone. Let's go ahead and get started. I want to welcome you today to the ECPN Conservation and a Changing World. We are so excited about today's panel, and we hope to have a very lively discussion. Before we get started, I wanted to remind you of some of the tools that will help you engage with us today. Automatic captions are available for this in all conference sessions. To enable the captions, click on the CC link on the bottom of your toolbar. On the toolbar, you'll also find access to your chat feature. Please note that you can choose to post your chat to just the panelists or to panelists and attendees using the drop-down menu. While the chat is for more casual discourse and letting us know where you're tuning in from or just saying hello, if you have questions for the panelists, please post them in a separate Q&A box also found on the toolbar of your screen. This will help me keep track of the questions, and we're going to address those questions in the second half of our discussion. This session is being recorded and will be available on the website following the session. So let's get started. Myself along with all of the panelists here today would like to acknowledge that we are speaking to you from the unceded territories and homelands of so many Native people. We respectfully acknowledge these Native and Indigenous people, their elders, past and present, and honor with gratitude the land itself and those who have stewarded it throughout the generations. Please download the associated materials, which includes our full land acknowledgments, bios for the panelists, and additional materials. Now I'd like to introduce our panelists and then I'll turn it over to each of them for a brief introduction before we jump into the discussion. I am Jessica Abel. I'm a Project Conservator at the Penn Museum and I will be your moderator today. For our emerging professionals today, we have Joy Blozer, who is the Assistant Conservator at the Menil Collection, and Chris Kenosan, who is a current current student at Woodpeck. And for our established conservators, we have Sanchita Balachandran, who is the Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, Anisha Gupta, an incoming PhD student at the University of Delaware, and Glenn Wharton, the Professor of Art History at UCLA and Chair of the UCLA Getty Conservation Program. I'm now going to turn it over to each of our panelists and they're going to give you a brief introduction to themselves and their work. Joy, let's start with you. Thanks, Jess. As just noted, I'm newly joining the Menil Collection in Houston as the Assistant Objects Conservator and I work on a variety of objects in the collection and I get to focus on modern contemporary materials, which is my personal passion. I'm also a Chinese translator and income from translation work has been crucial to keeping me afloat through the financial hardships of pursuing a career as a conservator. A little background on how I got here, I didn't learn about conservation until my late 20s and was working abroad at a museum. I was quickly obsessed with conservation and moved home in 2011 to Colorado to pursue it. I took chemistry classes, translated, worked at a picture frame shop and did contract work at art fairs between semesters to pay for the coursework and all my bills. None of the Museum Conservation Labs in Denver agreed to let me intern or volunteer, so I widened my net and contacted Bev Perkins and Cody Wyoming and she apologized, she didn't have any funding, but said if I wanted to come volunteer to get my foot in the door I could. So I borrowed my sister's car and I drove to Cody Wyoming and I camped for four weeks in the Shoshone National Forest and worked in her lab as a volunteer. Bev helped me reach out to museums in Denver and get my foot in the door and told me about the grad schools and that I was probably an NYU type of candidate. By the end of the summer she'd helped me get a spot as a conservation volunteer at the Denver Museum and at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. So I moved to Denver, volunteered three days a week, worked translating and picture framing and finished my chemistry classes. I only applied to NYU my first year because I wanted to focus on contemporary art and I didn't have the right kind of pre-program hours for the other schools. I got an interview but didn't get in and then I turned 31 and I thought my life was over, which it wasn't, and I took another contract job at an art fair. Then I promised myself I'd try just one more time. So I moved to Philadelphia and got a chemistry internship in a polymer lab and a summer gig rehousing a ceramics collection. I applied to Buffalo, Delaware and NYU and was rejected from Delaware because I needed more science, waitlisted at Buffalo because I needed more conservation and thankfully got into NYU. So I moved to Brooklyn in the fall of 2014 on a bank loan and the little savings I had left and NYU offered a stipend of 20,000 for nine months dispersed since September and January with a $500 increase per year. I took out additional school loans to afford New York cost of living and pushed hard on the school to revamp financial policies and transparency during my time there. After I graduated I stayed in New York for a fellowship at MoMA then took a non-treatment contract job in Boston with a moving stipend so I could finally move in with my boyfriend after being long-distance for many years. I moved to Houston this past February and the Manille covered my moving expenses and I still take on translation work which helped me pay off debt from grad school and what I now use to build back savings and invest in retirement. It's funny to look back and I think I entered the field of conservation 10 years ago and I've moved 12 times. It's been a long circuitous road but I'm happy I'm here and this is all to say that we have some serious financial problems in our field that can and will improve but in the meantime I think my advice would be to persevere to develop a side hustle for money that you can rely on and to build a relationship with a sponsor in the field like Bev was for me who can help you bang down doors. And as a final word I would say that we all need to be negotiating for higher pay every single time we offer or offer to job internship contractor stipend. So you can do it you just have to ask. That's it. Thanks so much Joy. Chris? I want to second everything Joy just said. Those are great sentiments. Thank you. That's a great way to start off. I want to say thank you all for joining us today and I'm incredibly grateful to be part of this amazing panel life. I looked up to all of you. So I'm a second year graduate student at Wynjutory University of Delaware program in art conservation or Bluepack. I specialize in textiles with a focus in modern and contemporary art and materials. I was born in a small conservative white rural town in West Michigan and I am the first and only person in my family to go to graduate school or to graduate from college in general. My family is working class. I spent four years between undergrad and getting accepted into Bluepack trying to get into grad school. I had multiple internships some paid some unpaid. At one point I was working four jobs at a single time with only one offering a steady paycheck. At the time I thought this made me a better candidate. It proved to what lengths I was willing to get into school. Now I realize how fundamentally harmful this thought process is. What if I had an emergency? I didn't have savings. I was essentially gambling with my life. I am privileged that I could put myself in a position to make that gamble. Many can't. Many have bills, debt, family to support and other obstacles. During those four years I moved five times to four different states. I didn't own a mattress and at times I didn't own a car. With even so few possessions I averaged that each move cost approximately a thousand dollars. In four years I dropped at least five thousand dollars to relocate for internships. In addition to the financial cost of those four years there's a mental health cost. The instability and isolation of these temporary internships took an incredible toll on me. None of this is meant to make you pity me. It's meant to demonstrate why I might not care so much about professional standards or a perceived necessity to create a hierarchical path into the conservation field via gatekeeping education through graduate schools. I don't have the answer as to how to fix the pathway to conservation but the system we have isn't working and it is keeping people out of conservation. It's actively harming people who do make it through. Why can't technicians be conservators? Why can't we learn apprentice style? Much of the bench work done in conservation is done by underpaid or unpaid interns anyway. We all know that. How many of these decisions are based on social constructs of what we perceive to be professionalism? On us getting stuck on believing that this is the way to make conservation more credible? What is stopping us from evolving to have a broader definition of what a conservator is? And how much is based on if you're of change? Why are we letting it stop us? That's it. Great. Thank you so much, Chris and Joy, both of you. I'm now going to turn it over to our more established conservators and Sanchita, let's start with you. Everyone, my script is in the link if that would be easier for someone and I'm old school have to read it off paper. So first of all, I'd say this AIC has been like a complete sea change. It is absolutely inspiring to feel like things are happening. And that I think is very much due to this emerging group of leaders. So I'm really grateful that it's happening. So I'm Sanchita Balachandran. I'm currently the associate director and conservator at the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum in Baltimore, Maryland where I've worked since 2010. I'm responsible for the care and use of the museum's collection, have a research and publishing role and teach undergraduate courses in technical research, museum practice and conservation ethics. I'm founder director of Untold Stories, a nonprofit organization that seeks to center the voices of BIPOC and other underrepresented voices in cultural heritage preservation. And I'm also a graduate student in the preservation studies PhD at the University of Delaware, working on how interdisciplinary tools from conservation may help us find evidence of the migrants, immigrants, women, enslaved people and children who made pots and Athens between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE. So even though I've had my job now for over a decade, I was a pre-program student back in the mid 1990s. I went to college secretly in love with art history, but declared myself pre-med. My first year I was lucky to get what is now called a Getty Marrow undergraduate internship to do paid work at a college art gallery. And that is also how I found out about conservation which changed the course of my life. The next summer I volunteered part-time in the conservation department at the UCLA Fowler Museum and I continued volunteering during winter breaks, something I could do because I could stay with my parents and take the bus to the museum. By my senior year I knew I wanted to apply to conservation grad school and I only applied to the NYU Conservation Center because I genuinely wanted a graduate degree in art history, wanted to live in New York City and because I thought it was the only school that would consider me given the limited amount of pre-program experience I had. If I didn't get in on my first try I plan to pursue a fully funded PhD program in art history at UCLA. I got in so I went even though there was no stipend support my first semester in residence and I had to borrow money to live. Even with funding my annual stipend was about $18,000 a year in New York City. During my four grad school years I traveled every summer for field work or internships. Over the next nine years I moved seven times to keep working, three times for graduate internships or fellowships, the rest for a combination of private practice, field work and short-term contracts. Except for a couple of decently paid years working on federal contracts my average salary in all those years was in the mid-20 thousands which was deeply demoralizing. I love my work but it was hard to be barely scraping by after all these years of education. I was nine years out of graduate school by the time I got my first permanent job the one I have now and felt like I could stop worrying about money all the time. In the middle of all these changes I got married, had two children and started two different PhD programs. I tell you these things to reassure you that there's no single or direct path to what feels like a real career. You also have to be willing to look outside what our field calls success and adjust who you thought you wanted to be. When I finished graduate school in 2001 the job that I thought I wanted was a hands on treatment focused job at a major metropolitan museum. Now I have a job that is minimal treatment and mostly teaching and research at a small university museum and honestly I couldn't have imagined something I enjoy more. If I've learned anything it's that finding your way requires sheer luck, good work, hard work, self-belief and flexibility in equal measure. Thanks and good luck. Thanks Sanjita. Anisha. Hi everyone I'm Anisha Gupta and I'm a paper and preventive conservator. I feel very honored to be called an established conservator. I think if there's a word between emerging and established maybe that's where I mentally feel like I am. But I got my master's degree at the Winniter University of Delaware program and after I graduated in 2016 I did a fellowship at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and then I was an assistant paper conservator at the American Philosophical Society Library and Museum until just last month. I have decided to go back to school and get a PhD at the University of Delaware in the same program with Sanjita and I'll be starting there this fall. So like what other people are saying my pre-program journey also felt pretty rocky. My parents financially supported me through college but they didn't support the idea of me becoming a conservator. They knew the salaries are low and I think particularly as immigrants they were very scared for my financial future. I was pretty determined though so I actually pursued conservation in college but kept it a secret for them. They thought I was majoring just in chemistry but I was also majoring in art history and taking studio art classes. They didn't find out I was an art history major until they got their convocation invitation. I didn't know the invitations went out so early in the year and that's how how they learned about it but they still didn't know about conservation at the time. So I know a lot of conservators rely on family support so I'm bringing this up just because it's not everyone's story. It was a really difficult time in my relationship with my parents not being able to share this with them and it still kind of continues to be something that they are not as supportive of this many years later. I did do unpaid part-time internships in college alongside paid jobs including one in the conservation lab and because I lived in a small affordable college town I was able to support myself through this process. I was in the Midwest and I felt pretty isolated from the conservation field which felt like it was really happening more on the coasts and in the big cities. So I was really grateful ECPN was new at the time but it existed and it made me feel connected to other conservators. I felt just like I had this idea of a job that no one on my campus really knew about so I felt like I was just kind of floating on my own. My goal since the beginning was just to get a permanent job as a conservator at some institution. I almost didn't dare to dream what that would look like. I thought I might want to be at a big fine art museum but I knew how hard that would be and when I started conservation I decided that I would be willing to live anywhere and do anything to get a permanent job which as Chris has said is really not a healthy attitude. You do not put yourself first in any situation like that and I learned over the years how to center my own needs. I did get a permanent job as a conservator right after my fellowship which was really incredible but once I got there I realized that it wasn't actually fulfilling for me. So what brought me into conservation was access. I loved museum collections. I wanted to access them and I became a conservator to provide access to everyone else but I felt like that wasn't actually my role as a conservator. I was supposed to be a gatekeeper and I struggled with that since I've started. So I began to think critically about the role that objects that I was conserving played within their community's origin and how these roles might be subverted by our Western collections care practice. So that's what led me to pursue a PhD to better understand the relationships connecting objects, their creators and their caretakers. My research really aims to bring community-based practice into collections care methods and I will say especially in this discussion I do not think you need to get a PhD to do any of this. I just didn't think I could do that at the institutions that I had been in and honestly getting a PhD was kind of an out for me in a way to feel like I could have some individual takeover of the kind of research and work that I really wanted to be doing and I'm very grateful at how funded the PhD program is when you're a full-time student at least so I can make this work. Another part of my work is workplace advocacy as we're talking about. I want conservators especially emerging conservators to recognize their value and advocate for themselves starting with salary negotiation which can totally be the hardest part and one of the scariest things you can do so I'm really excited to be on this panel today to talk more about that so thank you. Great thanks so much Anisha and Glen. Hi everyone is there a word for post-established? Does one accrue Patina through the course of their career? I don't know how to position myself here but I'll go ahead and tell you about my career. I'll begin with the beginning but I'll also tell you about how I've reinvented myself many times over the last 40 years. I've worked in many different capacities but in the beginning I have a story that will now sound very familiar. After a one-year unpaid pre-program internship I entered the Cooperstown graduate program that's now Buffalo. I graduated in 1981 and spent five years working on fellowships while paying off a student loan. My final fellowships were at LACMA and the Getty Conservation Institute. At age 32 I was desperate to start my career and dedicated to staying in Southern California because my husband and our two children lived in Santa Barbara. With no museum jobs I established a private practice in object conservation. During the following years we built the business to five staff members. I spent every summer most summers during those years working on archaeological sites in Turkey and Cyprus. In 1996 I was faced with executing a conservation treatment requested by the state of Hawaii in the face of community resistance. It seemed only logical to me that the community should be involved in deciding how to care for their monument but the state resisted. Without the tools for community engagement ethnography or even a model for community or indigenous conservation I closed my private practice to pursue a PhD at age 45 at the Institute of Archaeology University College London. I eventually gained state permission to conduct the community-based project in Hawaii and used it as a case study for my research. I received my PhD, wrote my book, moved to New York to teach part-time at NYU in the Conservation Center and the Museum Studies Program. In 2007 I was hired by MoMA to launch their time-based media conservation program and I continued teaching in the Museum Studies Program one day per week. In 2013 I left MoMA to assume a full-time position in the Museum Studies Program at NYU and continue researching and writing about contemporary art conservation and finally in 2019 after 20 years in New York my husband and I moved back to California and I assume my current position. At UCLA Getty we're working on many initiatives to promote sustainability, collaborative conservation, and equity and inclusion. The same is happening in all the inactivity programs. I'm pleased to say that we'll soon change our name to remove the problematic term ethnographic from the name of our program. We're abolishing the GRE requirement and altering the requirement for pre-program internships and I'll be happy to speak about any of these efforts or about struggling to develop a career, running a private practice, life after PhD, systemic racism, or anything else the audience wants is interested in. Thank you all for joining us and thank you for inviting me to be a part of this panel. Great thank you so much Glen and thank you so much to all the panelists just so everyone knows you know I told them three minutes to introduce themselves and I think hopefully you're monitoring the chat but I think that that was a familiar but very inspiring three minutes with all of you so I'm really excited to delve into some of these questions. I think you know we've covered some of the topics here and I'm hoping that you know we can just start to explore some of the nuances a little bit more. So the first thing we're going to start with this afternoon is really you know talking about the career trajectory of a conservator and I think a lot of you mentioned that and so I've gone ahead and prepared some questions with a little bit of background information for our audience and for you all as well and I'd like to hear from all of you and you know feel free to jump in whenever. So let's see I'd like to start this conversation by talking about the typical structure of a conservation career from pre-program internships to graduate school, graduate school internships, fellowships, sometimes several of them short-term contract positions, and finally the hope of one day securing a full-time position. All of these steps in a career can require relocation and often come with financial hardships and insecurity due to low wages. In 2018 ECPN conducted its own compensation survey in which it found that the majority of graduate and postgraduate respondents 62% and 60% respectively reported that they were required to move for a position while 28% of pre-programmers responded the same. Only 3% of pre-programmers 21% of graduates and 19% of post-graduates were provided financial support for relocation. Joy and Chris you both spoke a bit about this but I would really like to hear more details if you can about your recent experiences navigating the financial hardships surrounding the impermanence of these pre-program internships, graduate school, the internships, the fellowships, the short-term project positions, and then you know open it up to the rest of the panel. I think the hardest part about it was that I had a great amount of savings when I started this journey and that I burned through it to do all the pre-program to kind of give yourself up for it. So by the time I got to grad school I was essentially broke. So when you get in there then there was a reliance on either I was the only person in my class who had a credit card because I was on the one who had credit. So it was interesting that I was also extending credit to my classmates who when we needed to go you had to pre-buy things and get reimbursed. And so there was this entire reimbursement thing that was costing me a lot of money because it was on my credit card. And so it was interesting that it was a benefit for me coming in as an older conservator at 31 being the oldest in the school. And then but also kind of it was such a detriment for younger students coming in. And I found that to be really big hindrance with my classmates coming through. And then as we kind of moved through the programs we there was money for certain things and there's a way to get money if you can kind of navigate through it. There are places to find money to move or to get a new program. And we were lucky at NYU they were really pushing paid summer internships so they were making sure we weren't accepting unpaid summer internships at that point at school which I really appreciate. And then coming out of that after moving every summer and I think we talk about I moved 12 times but that doesn't count I also moved back to my apartment so I moved to DC for an internship then I had to move back. And it costs a lot of money both ways if you're going to bring anything at all really are getting there. So what I really did count how many times I actually moved I think I moved 19 times. So you know but I kept my apartment in New York and I sublet it or I Airbnb it before about really illegal you know so it's kind of this like funny thing of like how you could where you can get money from and my classmates always joke to me that I was always on a side hustle but it was just wanting to keep good credit and I actually had to repair my credit after I got out of grad school because like it dropped so low because you've got to have your undergrad loans and they took out graduate school loans. So it's kind of was this interesting thing of like me being wanting to be fiscally responsible financially wanting to build up my you know like ability to be a human self-sustaining and still navigate all of the different positions. But I was a little lucky the Manila collection covered my moving expenses. MFA Boston was a contract position and I had a moving stipend for that as well. So I feel like that hopefully is moving towards a better direction for after fellowships. I don't know Chris if you want to speak to more of the other in between. Yeah I've never been paid to move that would be that would be nice. So I guess I can speak to the stipend experience at Woodpack. We make 2150 the first year 2250 the second year and 2550 the third year when you have a third year placement and we are it's a nine month stipend. So the expectation is that you will find funding for your summer and I've never met anyone who didn't find funding. There's Debbie helps you a lot the program helps you. That being said in the state of Delaware I still qualify for food stamps. I still live under the poverty line. I am making more money now than I ever have in my entire life so that's saying something and I don't have savings. I don't even want to look at my credit. I mean I get apartments so that feels like I'm doing something. I don't know I don't have I I feel like I'm being very negative. My advice for people is to recognize that you are human and conservation takes a long time can take a long time to get into and that's okay like that is you're not a failure if you choose any way none of that is a failure taking a long time taking a short time deciding that it's not for you none of that is a failure. All of this is an incredible learning experience and even though you know we're talking about these hardships we're also we're like building a support for you. We've all been through that you can come talk to us so because I I really appreciate that though I don't know that I want to agree with you that running your credit into the ground is okay but I very much appreciate both of your perspectives and you know I'm happy to hear from from everybody else about how they have they've gotten through it and and what that other side is like yeah Sanjita. So I might want to have to do a quick correction because I had the $18,000 a year as a grad student number but that included like anything I earned outside of the nine months that I got a stipend so I usually got paid in the summer just to like clarify I mean it's still terrible right it's absolutely terrible but that is actually anyway doesn't matter. One of the things I want to say is part of the reason why I think a lot of people don't have these requisite hours to apply to grad school is you know when they're in positions like mine where I I could not afford to not work as an undergrad and so when I did part-time volunteering that meant that the rest of the time I was doing some kind of job in order to get paid because it was absolutely necessary for me and that automatically just makes it hard for a lot of people to even consider this track um and I have to say you know just thinking about the position that I'm in now I don't take on anybody if I'm not paying them for their time absolutely not and you should just not kind of perpetuate this volunteerism I mean volunteerism can be great but I think when especially when this kind of power dynamic exists it should not be something that you then force on people who are already really struggling to make it so this I think really needs to change um I'm also thinking I mean I know a lot of graduate students now I work with a lot of them I mean the average graduate students type in here in Baltimore which is a you know the cost of living is much lower than some of these major metropolitan centers is $34,000 a year so that's for a PhD one could argue but I mean this is the kind of benchmark right like the very basic thing 34,000 a year plus health benefits and I feel like that is much more of a livable wage so these are just the kinds of things that I'm I'm thinking about like we need to think about what actually makes this kind of graduate school time in particular livable so that people can actually focus on their work instead of worrying about their health insurance not having food I mean I lived on a bagel diet for three years what does that do to your insides right so we just we just need to really rethink what we consider support as an environment yeah yeah I think I think that those are really great points um does anybody else want to chime in okay well then we'll keep going um and well you know along the same path I think looking at this in the wake of COVID there were many emerging professionals who lost internship opportunities they lost funding for fellowships they lost contract renewals or were furloughed in the field and those who were lucky enough to keep their positions are struggling with the drawn out process of eventually securing a full-time position and gaining a bit of stability in life as you were just talking about Sanjita so in that same 2018 compensation survey we found that ECPs are asked to relocate for termed or contract positions the survey found that of the 383 respondents 48.5 reported that their position was term limited and when asked if they knew whether or not their position could be extended only 33 only 33 of those respondents were confident of this possibility and 62 said that they were uncertain and 64 just didn't even respond so um Glenn I'm going to start with you this time and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this new data do you have a sense from your students that this is a significant issue in the field for those who are just starting out um do you have any advice for ECPs about how to navigate the expectations around fellowships and short-term contracts um I've heard from ECPs that in some instances in large established institutions uh fellowships are no longer counting towards years of experience and it's making it harder to secure a permanent or a full-time position or most importantly maybe to negotiate for these higher salaries that we're talking about um I think many ECPs right now are worried that the new expectation in the field is that you take on more and more fellowships and then contract work meaning that the cycle of relocation and low paying work continues for many years maybe longer than it used to maybe not um but any advice or thoughts that you have um for recent graduates stuck in the cycle I think would be greatly appreciated boy there's so many ways I could answer this and I and I don't want to dominate over the next 30 minutes providing different ways to answer but so I'll just say a few things um yes for my position um now at the UCLA Getty Program and just being in contact with other anacpic students I can say that there's a lot of anxiety right now um about everything from trying to learn conservation through zoom to um in-person internships uh being available this summer and next year what the job situation is going to be like in the post pandemic world um and this coupled with the knowledge that they're entering a profession with low salaries and systemic bias um so but one thing I would like to say is that I've seen this throughout the my time in the profession um there are ups and downs in the economy there was a problem in the late 1990s with the rise of the museum education a lot of conservation programs were then shut down in museums um and then of course in the the recession around 1910 um a lot of people lost their jobs and there were very few jobs the economy then changes comes back or has in my career so there's a fluctuation in the in the economy that we can't really control um and that we have to just deal with on a personal and institutional basis um but I also see cultural change um within institutions and I'm really heartened to see the growing resistance in our field among young conservators and others um to resist this and to really push for structural changes in the field uh we're doing what we can within the UCLA Getty program I could talk more about that um but I think you ask for advice um I've reinvented myself many times for my own personal reasons and I think we all need to be really nimble in our career and look for opportunities and you know maybe I'll just say a little bit about what people look for um when they're hiring or accepting students into graduate school so I'm not sure everyone has a good sense of that um often many really well and over qualified people apply for positions or apply for um graduate school in our field and so the review committees are really looking for more than just checking off all the boxes they're looking holistically at the people who are applying so we go deep into CVs looking for um trying to read between the lines and letter of references is this person motivated do they share our values do they have leadership potential do they have a track record of working to advance the profession or in our case in our program is there evidence of fighting for social justice collaborative practice and sustainability because those are the stated values for our program and I also just have to say networking networking it's it's inevitable in our small field like ours that people are going to be looking for people who know other people and evidence of no are they saying they're good and this is really unfair to people who don't have access and we need to fight fight this in every way that we can I'm happy to see that a lot of funding agencies are now realizing this and providing funds to give access to people who haven't had it in the past um but I do believe that having human connections and making human connections is just a really important way to advance in our field so I could like I said I could answer this in many other ways but I don't want to dominate so maybe I'll just leave it at that for now great now thank you I think that you know those are some really good suggestions for people and interesting issues that you've brought up about um access and knowing people and networking um if no one else has anything to say then I'd like to move on to education can I add one thing just really quick yeah please um you know Glenn talked about like reinventing himself and I guess I just wanted to bring up this idea of um not losing yourself as you become a conservator I think you know we all come into this profession because we have a deep passion for some aspect of the work we do and perhaps that's doing bench treatment all the time but I imagine there's intersections of other interests you have that come into this like Joy was talking about being a translator which is kind of you know a unique act unique point I was interested in like access and I found a home with museum educators um who are doing the work I want to do but I just want to be a conservator doing that work you know I would say um in a pandemic economy that is so turbulent thinking of what your passions are in this and finding opportunities to to spin your skills to do different things I mean it's it's horrible to say you do all of this work and then you can't do the thing that you want to do I completely recognize that but in this sort of crisis moment that we're in I think uh you don't being a successful conservator does not mean sitting at a bench and doing treatment and hopefully that's illustrated by all of the things that this whole panel has done and so yeah nylissing transferable skills exactly the words I'm looking for um but you know I I do think there's a level of innovation that our field hasn't really broached as much you know we certainly have a lot of entrepreneurship in our field but we can be really innovative in the kinds of positions we're even creating for ourselves and I think there's kind of a whole new world in that as long as we say to be a conservator you don't need to sit there with an in-painting brush or whatever um so I just wanted to bring that bring that up too no I I think that that's really great um and I think you know I mean that's sort of some of what we were getting at during the opening session about opening up with the definition of a conservator really is and I think that that's definitely important and and helpful information and nyliss absolutely true that you know we have so many skills as conservators there are other other things that we can be doing um and other ways that we can think about our work and our position so I think that that's a great um great piece of advice joy I don't want to call you out but you did mention unions in the chat do you want to talk a little bit just for a minute about your experience with the union at MFA and how that was able to help sure I was um it's kind of two things I was at MoMA as well and MoMA unionized quite a while ago um and so it's interesting because it's the MoMA's I might get the names the types of groups wrong so please correct me if I'm wrong but um the MoMA union or the union that MoMA organized with is helping other museums to organize as well so when I was at MFA Boston that same union chapter was helping MFA Boston unionize off of the experience that they've had at MoMA so it was interesting to be in a place that had already negotiated it had already had a union rep and I you know I wasn't part of that because fellows are not allowed to be in the union at MoMA but that's different based on different museums of it can be um negotiated different depending on the museums you're at so but because MoMA had done such a good job of advocating for higher pay I wasn't one of the higher paying fellowships for object conservation and I think it was because the museum had already um unionized and had like had already negotiated these contracts higher so going to MFA Boston where a majority of the conservators are all contract based even ones who've been there for 10 15 years so contracts getting renewed annually they're unionizing while I was there which was really interesting and to see everyone kind of come together to understand that this was unstable and um uh working to unionize so that they can negotiate actual proper permanent jobs because the jobs are permanent they've been there for 10 15 years they're not contract jobs um so it kind of takes out that um that bit but I think Yves is on Yves is very knowledgeable about the MFA Boston unionizing efforts which I'm sure she'll add more in the chat on that but I think it's a really important step and um and it's really important to help with advocating for equity for safety and reporting any sort of um any sort of violence or inequity or anything that you're filling in your workplace and things like that and it's a really wonderful model for advocacy and I found it really supportive at MoMA so yeah no I think that that's a really important point and you know something that maybe we weren't thinking about so much or maybe I wasn't thinking about so much before COVID but you know like in the wake of this pandemic I think that that idea of what's permanent people being on contract for 10 years really all of a sudden was thrown into question and I think these recent unionizing efforts at various museums are I think that's an important thing for us to consider because I mean it really does change you know the way you live your life do you buy a home do you like you know like what can you do if you're living in a city for 10 years on a permanent year-to-year contract so I also say I was at NYU when NYU the graduate students also unionized while I was there and it was great because it our pay increased for being course assistants so we all got a big pay increase with that as well and so that was also a really positive union experience for conservators that's great that's great all right well if no one has anything else then I'm just going to keep going so many ecps fear that the level of education and the financial burden is going up but the salaries remain the same ecps are concerned that the rising number of phd's could potentially change the field in terms of devaluing the master's degree and exacerbating issues of access equality and inclusion so Sanchita I'm going to start with you this time as someone who's currently working on a phd and Anisha as someone who's recently decided to pursue a phd do you think that phd's will become the new baseline standard in the field the way the master's degree has will salaries increase in order to be commensurate with the level of education required and how will this affect the percentage of conservators or how will this affect the perception of conservators qualifications and ultimately access to higher levels in the museum world so it's so I work in a university museum so it's kind of a different setting than you know the Met or MoMA or any of these other institutions we've been talking about and so being within an academic institution means the basic degree basic qualification often is the phd a lot of what I've found having now been in this academic context for some time now is that you you simply don't have a voice if you don't have a phd it's very frustrating it doesn't matter how good your research is you're just not invited and in some cases you can apply for for grants that luckily has not been the case for me I've had a really incredibly supportive director but a lot of people I know who have our kinds of professional qualifications even if they are the terminal degrees in our fields are not not allowed to do anything outside of their kind of narrowly defined staff positions and again I'm very lucky in that my position was defined really broadly and I have a lot of support to do much you know more collaborative research oriented things than a lot of people with the same type of title so that was the first thing that was really kind of driving me and really frustrated me but the second I think the phd is not something to do to get just the qualification this is my third time in graduate school I can tell you a very pathetic story from the last time I attempted to start a phd program but that's for you know a time when we don't need to go there but but really this time I went back to graduate school because I have some burning questions intellectual questions that I need to spend time answering and it is incredibly exhausting to do a phd under any circumstances I have a full-time job I have a family I have other things I want to do with my life I'm not my work but I also had this burning desire to spend some time answering these questions and I have to say the current program that I'm in the University of Delaware has been amazing where they understand me as a full human being and it's also wonderful to be able to go in and not ask for funding and that's an incredibly privileged position because I have a full-time job and I don't need them to support me financially other than pay for my tuition which already of course is huge so I came to it with a very different perspective now what is that going to do in terms of my my peers and colleagues I'm just not that's not what I'm going for and frankly the the kinds of jobs that I was looking at as a practicing conservator are very different than the kinds of jobs that I might aspire to with this degree I mean essentially what I want to do at some point is to just be be quiet in this room and write books that's what I want to do I don't want to you know look for more conservation treatment jobs but I also want to be able to advocate for all of us and say we are you know intellectuals we are innovators we are incredible collaborators and we need more funding to do the amazing work we can do so that's kind of where I'm coming from the other thing I want to just mention and it's in the download sheets but I wrote up a sheet for current graduate students because this is not just a problem for conservation but now that I'm in again this academic context I see all of the graduate students you know in various departments at my institution and I interact with a lot of them especially in in classics and cultural heritage and we're all dealing with these same problems right where graduate school is set up in really harmful ways academic institutions and a lot of these large institutions are set up in really harmful hierarchical ways and that all needs to change but in the meanwhile what are ways that we can support ourselves what are ways that we can just remember that our work is valid but we also have to have a life these are things that I really find myself advocating for especially with the graduate students I encounter because they are demoralized I mean this work is really hard no matter where you are no matter how comfortable you might be and it's all that much harder if you're dealing with all of these systemic forms of violence that exist in our world right so so to me it's really about how can we do the work we love I mean I do this PhD because I love it I no one can stop me from doing this because I love it but I also want other people to have the things that they need so that they can pursue their best work that they love so I'll put that in the chat as well so well I can add to that a little bit as a incoming PhD I was going to say current but not quite there I think it's similar to my reasons for doing a PhD were purely personal they really similarly were not because I thought it was going to get me a leg up in any sort of conservation job I do think it opens up things like academic positions though those are highly sought after positions academia is not a path that really opens up in a way that is feasible so so though that is an option it's not for me a reason to do a PhD it really has been just a very sort of intimate relationship with my work and wanting to have the time and space to devote to it and the fact that it's funded is is the reason that I can pursue it as well as like its location the PhD stipend is not enough to live in a major metropolitan area I would think so so you know those are kind of the logistics of it and I will say like I pursued that with that financial aspect of it completely in mind as well I think there was a question from Michelle Fatini asking about if our pads if our degrees master's degrees are really only a master's you know do they kind of is it on its way to a PhD and that's interesting I bring that up because as I was getting my master's degree my husband was getting his PhD and it felt very much like you know a super master's degree or a mini PhD you know our pads were so similar just had some fewer expectations and some you know fewer years and so I think that's something to think about in a world where or at least in the U.S. where we're getting increasing degrees you know a high school degree means something different than it used to a bachelor's degree means something different so I do think that's like an interesting thing to think about if your master's was like an on-ramp to the PhD which I think at Delaware in some ways it is that you don't you know you don't do the same amount of coursework because you're expected to come in with a master's degree so I think it's great to be bringing these ideas up now because I can imagine it would be a lot of work to sort of reconfigure how these programs are but I do think it's something to think again if we're talking about valuing the work we do thinking about how intense our master's programs are and thinking about what the value of our degrees are is really important and I think that there was a part of this about salary and like I it's it's hard to imagine a lot of scenarios where our jobs are going to get increasingly like paid so much better because you're coming in with a PhD I hope so but I'm not sure yeah I just want to quickly follow up on that on the salary question so within my institution I make more money than some people who have PhDs because of how exploitative higher education and who teaches you know and how their contracts are set up to teach are so following up on that unionizing conversation that was happening earlier what I found is that you know it's really important to find allies in whatever way you can so I end up with all of the other instructors the people who have contracts and are not tenure track because we do similar work and our you know our pay grades are all over the place and we're often seen as very different in terms of our value to the institution as opposed to you know these tenure track people so a PhD might not necessarily mean anything at all in terms of the salary just to reiterate that I see the ground I have nothing I'm gonna go with Chris and then Glenn I just a small thing thinking about like standards and PhDs becoming the new masters that gives me a lot of anxiety being in a graduate school there's nothing that is a standard except that I get a graduate degree at the end of it it doesn't feel to me like my my peers are learning the same thing as me it feels very tailored to what I want it to be and that doesn't like I'm I'm wondering what is the standard of the graduate school degree other than that we're getting a graduate school degree so that makes me want to back up and and instead think about what what does a graduate school degree get you should this be the standard what does that standard mean so you know before we even get to his PhD going to be this new standard what is the standard of a graduate school degree and why why have we created that that's where I'll leave it Glenn well I wasn't going to address that I could but I was going to go back to what Anisha and Sanchita were saying about the PhD I like them decided to pursue a PhD in my mid-career because I was forced with the situation that I could not even get out of my mind the these people in Hawaii who wanted to take care of their sculpture in the state telling me that no I had to go in and gold leaf it when they were painting it and I realized that there was something really wrong with our profession and really lacking in my own skill set and knowledge and I needed to I just had to do this I had to like to stop everything in life and pursue this and learn what ethnography was learn what how public artists work with communities and how how one can empower communities through engagement in narrating how their own past is told through this conservation effort so I was driven to do this I did not enter a PhD program that was paid fortunately I'd been running a private practice for I think 12 years at that point and so I was able to keep doing private practice on the side while I was you know being a PhD student so that's how I made it financially but in terms of I just like to say several other things really quickly I think pursuing a PhD prepares you to do something very different in life and I don't think most people with PhDs are going to be competing for museum jobs as conservators I actually did get a job at MoMA I was very surprised about that I didn't think any museum would hire me with a PhD I thought I would be either working with an NGO or maybe in a university as it turned out I worked in museum studies at NYU for 16 years but I was never on tenure track so it was a full-time job but it was a it was a sort of a lower class professorial position as Sanchita mentioned there's a lot lots of different sort of scales and ways to be an academic it wasn't until I was 65 that I accepted a tenure track I was given tenure but but accepted a position within that system so yeah I think this is a very complex question about PhDs in our field let me just say one more thing as I was negotiating my job at UCLA the dean promised me two new faculty members so we can expand our program that's been put on hold because of COVID but hopefully that will come up soon but he told me we're not hiring anybody without a PhD and for a tenure track position and the reason why is the university culture as Sanchita mentioned um so much sinners around having a PhD that a conservation graduate program at a research university without faculty with PhDs is going to be looked at as a sort of a vocational program and really devalued within the university system so I'm not arguing you know that all conservation professors should have PhDs not at all but I'm just saying from the university perspective there's some really good arguments because of the university culture so I'll leave it at that I think what's also really interesting about the PhD system is that in the U.S. anyway that it's theoretically based that it's a theory based pursuit of study and not a hands-on pursuit of study and thinking about how the distinction in Europe for PhD PhDs I would love to hear more Glenn if you want to speak back to that again but to think about like can we learn from Europe and how they've integrated PhDs I think what's interesting about there's a fear for like I think Chris and I both kind of like oh gosh take him back to grad school but like there's a fear that we might have to go back to get a PhD but I don't think that that's actually the case I think that we can expand our field to find position in space for all of this and I think what I love about the European conservation community is how much space there is for theory I have um especially in contemporary art conservation my mind has been blown by the um by the theoretical pursuit in Europe and I think that's driven by a broader base of PhD candidates and I think that if we can move away from being having kind of a scarcity fear based model that somehow the PhDs are going to get all our jobs that it's okay for them to find space within our conservation community in the U.S. I think for a greater expansion and for a greater thought on our field I mean like the things that Anisha is going to be studying in her PhD program are going to be huge for us you know and I think it's really important that you're doing this work and I think it's going to have a big impact on our field so it's kind of interesting to make sure that we're not cornering it into back to scarcity and that can be really expansive I think yeah Santita so one piece of advice I got when I was looking at PhD programs and you know again this is my second time starting a PhD program so I really you know 10 years of thinking about this so it wasn't like I just decided to do it so you need to think about it but the best piece of advice I got about the PhD is thinking about who you want to be in conversation with and for me there were certain things that were really bothering me about the way ancient studies is written and you know and that's because I engage with that material as a conservator with the collection that I work on and there were so many ways in which so many people's contributions and the diversity of the ancient world was completely ignored and my PhD is actually a combination of theory and very applied you know RTI work and experimental work so I think it's very possible but my decision actually was based on who I wanted to be in conversation with and for me that was to disrupt the existing scholarship in this particular place so you can see already this does not have anything to do with like taking the jobs of other conservators and I think we really need to you know kind of break out of that because that that is another kind of fear mongering that we don't really need to you know further. All right great thank you all so much I think there's a lot happening in the chat and if we have time I'm gonna try and come back to that after the questions that we got but for now I want to start our last topic as we are you know coming sort of to the end of our session and I want to really drill down on salary we've talked about it in a number of ways through a couple different lenses and we've we've had this conversation in our field a number of times you know we know that conservation is a female dominated field and we know that women are paid around a third of what their male counterparts Suzanne Davis has published on this ECPN has had a webinar on this and and yet the issue remains. So I think the new angle on this conversation is that in the wake of COVID-19 and the economic turn turn down ECPs are really beginning to push back on low salaries in general as we've heard a number of times today and so I'm going to again reference the 2018 compensation survey which found that only 50 percent of the respondents from postgraduate demographic indicated that they were able to live independently and fulfill basic needs through conservation employment. We often hear that the rationale for keeping salaries low is so that more positions can be created but many have responded to that argument by stating that the continued creation of low paying jobs even in potentially greater numbers ensures that the jobs are only accessible to the same demographic of people who currently occupy them which tend to be middle to upper class white women or those who can afford to take such low paying positions. So my last question to all of you is how can we claim to be working towards a more equitable and diverse field without first addressing the low salary issue? Joy I don't know if you're planning you're unmuted but I'll just there's so much to say about that I mean 100 percent we have to address salaries and I think a small step is posting salaries not knowing what a salary is going through all of the work sometimes paying for your way to an interview site all of that which is also not equitable and should not be happening but certainly is happening you know I think the field has even been resistant to those small steps of saying let us require salaries be part of our job postings. I am incredibly grateful to all of the people who mostly early career professionals who put their name out there and say can you please post this repost this with a salary I mean that should not be the system that should not be like us hoping that someone's paying enough attention and their free time to do that. I don't want to get caught up in just salary postings but you know I think it's just in the equity and inclusion committee that was one of the first things we've tried to do because we saw it as low hanging fruit and here we are like years later still not having solved that issue because we got so much resistance from a technological standpoint from just people disagreeing with the logic that you know HR managers do not want to post salaries so I will just say that I think that we need to be for us to be able to raise the salaries we need to be pushing at every single angle that we have access to from both a hiring position and if you're a job seeker and it's certainly much more vulnerable if you are the job seeker and so for those of us who are on the hiring side the more we can do to push the numbers and to push the culture the bigger impact will have and I will just say that like we hear so often I guess people are not recognizing that this can be good for everyone I mean if you raise up the people at the bottom you raise up the whole field if the people coming in are more transparent you know how much they're getting paid if they're getting paid as much as you and you've been there for five years like that's an opportunity to do something those are hard numbers so we definitely need to be talking more and more about money I'm happy we're talking about it now in the past few years but we need to be talking about it even more and it comes down to the kind of culture we've created a feeling lucky to get a you know one dollar paying job because yesterday we were getting paid zero dollars I mean just all of it is not okay and so the more we talk about it the better but again like I really urge everyone to whatever whatever see at whatever table you have to be really pushing this issue because that's the only way it's going to happen yeah to follow up on Anisha I think the more and more we all talk about it I find that among my colleagues and my my colleagues in conservation we talk a lot about salary and people will call and be like I just got offered this how much is that did you get offered a how much did you get for your moving statement did you get that there and like there's a lot of back end side of things and it helps you push forward I will say also when I was negotiating my salary I sent my response first to us one of my other sponsors I guess another chief conservator at a different museum that I really trusted and I was like is this an okay response to ask for more money and it was great they gave me a really great insight into the response the email response because they want the pay to also increase but there's pressure from HR to make sure that that's the initial offer is what it is but you can always come back and ask for more but I think we're also I'm really cognizant of the fact that all of us are coming this out of museum institutional orientation and that the field and private practice is quite different and that pay is often higher in private practice and so and also bench work and a lot more conservation treatment is happening in private practice now you know so it's interesting to see how the shift in actual conservation work is happening a lot more outside the museum and I think actually once we find a better way for private practice to be able to be more transparent in how much people are making that I think it's going to really raise up more salaries in the museum because if you think about how much we're paying for a contract for one artwork to get restored by a private store or a conservator because we don't have time in the museum you know that helps increase our just kind of that general awareness of like there's a lot of money in art no one said arts broke field it's not there's a ton of money so it's just figuring out where that money is and negotiating a bigger pie for conservation and there is one because it's happening in private practice so until we can kind of institutionalize that notion that's where we can actually I think that we'll be able to see a lot more transparency in breaking that open yeah I think that's a great point about private practice and something that you know we don't well we don't talk about necessarily as much as we should but I think is is a big part of this and I actually really liked how you tied it into the fact that you know oftentimes museums are partnering with contract conservators and and the pay is different there and it's recognized there and so it's not that it's unknown to those in the museum world it's just looked at very differently and I think that that's a great idea as a place to start yeah Glenn I just want to say having run a private practice for 16 years private practice is very a lot in conservation and conservators who work on contemporary art in New York are probably making a lot of money but conservators who are working on archaeological indigenous materials textiles and in rural areas are really struggling it's a very different economy so I just want to say that it really varies a lot and sometimes museums conservators with benefits and you know secure salaries don't understand the struggles that some private conservators or many private conservators have yeah thank you I think that's really important insight to have too and I appreciate you pulling from your experience in private practice yeah Santita so just following up on what Glenn said I mean not only does revenue from private practice vary from region to region in specialty to specialty but year to year I mean some years I had you know extraordinary well within reason like significantly more money than other years and often you're just like hoarding as much work as you can probably taking on too much and freaking yourself out in order to sort of save because the next year might be a COVID year right but that being said when I was up for this job at Hopkins the reason why I could negotiate a higher salary than they were going to offer me is because I could show them my tax return from the previous year where I had two federal government contracts and I was like I'm not taking your crappy job and they said well you know what would you need in order for this to work out I mean luckily they wanted you know they wanted to hire me which is always a good thing and I could negotiate other things like I wanted to have summers flexible so that I could continue doing field work and continue doing research so we should also think about other things that could make you happy that can help with you know your sustainable lifestyle however you define that so that's one thing another thing I want to point out is there are a lot of us in comfortable positions who continue to suggest to people that they volunteer or they give up their labor for free or very little pay we need to stop that we need to absolutely stop that and say you know and I'm not willing to volunteer my time don't set that as the standard right because it really harms all of these other people who are not in a position to say I can't take it without compensation so we need to value our time and value the time of all these people that we claim to want to support and uplift and then I think the one other thing in terms of where are all the jobs right this is kind of the the problem of our field in some ways I think part of the reason why we don't have jobs is because we are looking to the same set of institutions and under I don't know the same set of poorly set up institutions to provide this kind of bounty of jobs cultural heritage is something that people feel in their hearts and their souls like this is you know people need this to live and I think COVID has really shown that this is what allows people to kind of continue on in times of incredible turmoil and heartbreak I mean you just have to open the you know the newspaper today and there's so much going on and yet people are surviving because they're tied to their heritage right we should be able to actually expand our understandings of what kind of work we can do because there's money in everything that actually supports things that are life giving to people so I think it's you know up to us to really expand the ways in which we can interface with all of these other industries all of these other ways in which people are working and really provide service right instead of being at the service of curators a lot of us I think are frustrated by being in that kind of service position what would it be like to be in service to communities broadly defined who really want us to work with them want our help and therefore be able to get different forms of funding I think that is the challenge and the money is out there we just need to kind of change the way that we're thinking about what success means I see a lot of nodding heads and I think I think a lot of us agree and appreciate hearing that changing what success means okay so with that I'm going to switch over to the Q&A and I know that there's been a lot happening in the chat I haven't been able to keep up with the chat as much so if you've posted a question in the chat and you want me to pose it to the panelists if you'll look at your little toolbar there's a Q&A section so I'm gonna I'm gonna read from those first so starting at the top can you give advice slash thoughts on what happens when you try to negotiate and fail when there aren't many jobs slash fellowships available after graduation and when these opportunities are exciting is the side hustle the only way forward how do we put pressure on the institutions that offer unlivable circumstances I can start with that um yeah so so that that's a really great question and I think that's always the fear is you're going to negotiate and not get what you want um I think there's a few options depending on the situation you're in I would say the first is that you you know you can like some people are brought up you can negotiate things that are not money if if those are things important to you you want to be negotiating the salary and salary and benefits are separate but if it's something you really want and there's other ways to get to where you need to go there's ways to negotiate maybe a different schedule like working four days a week or working shortened days to do other things that might bring you value in your life or help you save money or make money in a different way I do not think the side hustle is the only way forward I think having fallback plans and plan bs and things like that is great but I think we shouldn't perpetuate the idea that this is conservation can only be a part-time job because of how much it pays so I would think about like are there other ways that you can do what you want to do like like days for teaching days for research whatever that might be and then like negotiating the other benefits like health insurance and other things um there was like a second part to that question so I'm just going to bring it up sorry um but oh how do we put pressure on institutions yeah well there's you know I I I think that um telling institutions the reality of what they're offering you can first of all be part of your negotiation if they're paying you so little that you can't live there and it you know you're living under the poverty line you're using the MIT living wage calculator like if that's a situation you're in that's a negotiation tactic I mean you need to bring that up and tell them that and those numbers can be really eye opening um these are people with humanity they want you to be able to not live on food stamps and I think bringing all of that up to them some people are very clueless about rent you know they they have bought a house 30 years ago they do not know you're paying $2,000 in rent and what the cost of public transportation is and how much milk is at the grocery store right like they're living in a whole foods world and maybe you're living at like the Aldi world whatever um so I think really like putting down the numbers in your negotiation I put down how much it's going to cost me to move and I don't just put down you know a budget line I put down the hotel the car the truck the you know whatever because these are not people that that might understand these things so again that's negotiation tactics that's not the same but if you're turning down a position and this is all up to your comfort but if you're having to turn down a position because you you can't live on what they're telling you but they're giving you saying that and and being clear about that if you feel comfortable doing that can go a long way in um helping them uh increase you know taking that to the people who control the purse strings and trying to increase the stipends and I know students have been successful with that but you're totally going out on a limb if you don't feel like you can do that maybe you have like a mentor or advisor who can step in and help you through that process so you're not just someone who turned on a job because you're not getting paid enough right but I do think kind of mapping out the numbers uh can can show them that you really really want to take this job you just want them to meet you at a place that you can take it so I say reach out to the people in your network um or reach out to anyone on this panel if you don't feel comfortable with your network to help you through this you don't need to do this alone great okay um Chris applauded so I think we'll move on I think everyone agrees um if given the opportunity to change any element of the conservation career path post secondary emerging jobs established career what would that look like or feel like are there any elements that we can take from career paths in other countries or professional fields apprenticeships already mentioned um tool shares rentable lab spaces or support for moving fees I see that same cheetahs at all at the stumper I'm not sure how to answer that um but maybe I'll just say something sort of um along the same the same lines that uh sanshita um mentioned that I think we do need to rethink what conservators can do in the world and we do need to look yes at other fields and see how they're developing and broadening and look at how the kinds of skills and knowledge that we have can be applied more broadly in cultural heritage management for instance um but there's also there's a number of fields close to ours where that could use conservation skills and knowledge everything from the insurance industry to law to cultural heritage management um and I think that and well in art history technical art history archaeology the same thing that they really value the material understanding that conservators have so I think one possibility in the future is that conservators will be adding new tools to their repertoire in order to work in adjacent fields and be really valued for what they can contribute thanks again that was actually really nice to hear I know as sanshita said I'm I'm one of the people who has often thought what else am I qualified for um and insurance didn't cross my mind and when you said it I was like oh wait that could be kind of interesting um so that was totally one of my side hustle plans in grad school is I would want to become an insurance agent but I could sell insurance to all the conservators who are doing private practice in their apartments I was like this is it I got it but I think on top of that I think you know kind of from the previous question too is I keep coming back to kind of um crowdsourcing I think a lot of what we can move forward and how we can push the envelope for it and a lot of stuff is toolshare as a rentable lab spaces like things like that that are joining but also you know everyone on this call if there is a post on the disc list that doesn't have the salary let's have everyone reply and ask for what the salary is you know there's 114 of us on this so that would be amazing but if you think about like this this crowdsourcing and what we can do and the pressure that we can build I think is quite amazing and I have seen um I have a colleague and she just joined a company uh installation and shipping company as their conservator because they were just working together all the time they made more sense for the conservator to work with the shipping company than to just content constantly be signing contracts with each other and so I think that there's a lot of creativity and where we can move forward with a conservator doesn't have to be a conservator a conservator might just be a qualification for many other things you know I like I like to look to Jill Sterrett a lot and think about how she became you know an upper management in the museum model and she wasn't working on anything in her lab or like at Pip Lawrence in or things like that and what they're doing and within the institutional structure um I think it's kind of like I don't know moving momentum great I'm going to keep moving so that we can try and get through as many of these as we can so do our paths really only equal a master's degree in conservation what about counting these experiences towards an accelerated doctorate degree if our field encouraged slash provided easier access to doctorate degrees than conservators could have more options to enter allied fields or teaching I might just jump in and say there are many different types of doctorate degrees and particularly in other countries there are doctorates of practice where you can actually do research but use case studies that you've done in the past conservation projects and write ups articles that you've published it's not so easy in this country but in the UK and Australia and other countries there are ways to get PhDs based on research and practice that you've already done so people interested in that may want to look into it great so next question everyone has touched on this in some way or another but can you talk about your work-life balance how can the conservation field in grad school fellowships full-time jobs support and encourage a healthy work-life balance I can't talk about my work-life life balance that's okay it looks like chris has the answer I don't think I have the answer but I am currently in the middle of finals week so I feel like I should say something I have been I have been advocating for my own personal boundaries in all of my professional settings I'm not very good at it I'm learning it's been a long way here I also have I've been lucky enough to have supervisors who had who are like you need to have boundaries I think finding what you need and then establishing boundaries is is the way to do it um and if someone doesn't respect those boundaries finding an advocate who will who can who can help you communicate those boundaries yeah I would say if you're in if you're in a position where you know you're not a student so you advocate for your boundaries and you're not getting them like at an institution then I think you have to rethink being at that institution like I think those boundaries need to be really like in a long-term situation really need to be enforced by you um and I I do I do things like even like writing down like non-negotiable things in my life like you know I will not tolerate x y and z and I kind of find that going through this thought process for myself helpful because when the situation arises I find myself I don't find myself crumbling to the pressure of just giving in to things um because I thought about it ahead of time you know without the specific situation and you know finding that support network that kind of helps you enforce those things and sort of checks in and you know when you're venting to them says wait is that is that okay like should we just be venting about this or should we be doing something about this you know enforcing your boundaries is like a whole other aspect of that but I think um that's definitely that's definitely my tactic too I really like that idea Anisha I think that that's great practical advice just writing down ahead of time so there's no question when it comes up okay so I'm going to quickly address this can Jessica expand on the comment that some places are not counting fellowship years as years experience when hiring for staff positions that's astonishing and so disheartening and I just want to say that I I completely agree and that this is information that's been reported to eCPN from various eCPs that this is something I don't know that it's new but it's something recently that we've found out and has come I think through our compensation survey from 2018 and if you'll stick around for the poster session right after this Caitlin Richison is going to present that information so that's all I can really say about that I don't know if any of the rest of you have heard about this or some of you are shaking your head or want to comment or just look at me in fear Chris then otherwise I'm going to move on because I like the next question based on Anisha's response to a previous question how can we calculate our value to an institution above the minimum slash living wage it seems like someone with a master's degree should be getting more than just that Santida zoom etiquette the one thing that I think has been really helpful is to always keep in mind what the mission of the organization that you're working for is and always think about how whatever project you're proposing whatever work you're planning to do really fits with that mission because I think a lot of the a lot of the pushback that I've seen that comes is when you're trying to do something that doesn't seem to align with what the institution claims it cares about and it goes back to what Glenn was saying like what are the values the stated values of that institution or whatever it is and if you can think about ways in which the project or whatever you want to innovate you know I think I'm always in favor of coming up with something that people have never seen before that fits with the mission that also fits with your deepest desire right like what do you want to contribute and it's really extraordinary if you can frame it in that way there are a lot of things that can happen of course you need a supportive you know supervisor someone else who can kind of go with you on that but even if you don't have a supportive supervisor I think even just being able to articulate what you care about relative to the institution or whatever situation you're in at least makes you feel like you're doing something that you care about and in some ways that's the most important thing I think I think that that's a great place to end and some some great advice so if no one has anything else to say I think I just want to thank all of you so much for agreeing to be on this panel I think this has been a really really wonderful conversation I know that I've learned a lot and I really appreciate the insight from all of your different experiences there's a lot happening in the chat so I think that a lot of people have taken away some good information for this so I'm just going to say that now we're going to you know pause and then we have two really great posters that are going to be presented and then following our poster session we have our annual ECP and town hall information session so if you can stick with us otherwise thank you all for attending and especially thank you again to our panelists this has been really wonderful hi everyone if you're just tuning in this is now the ECPN poster session we've got two really great posters today and I'm just going to take a minute and introduce our authors well I'm going to introduce them and then allow them to introduce themselves let's start with Caitlin Richison Caitlin if you just want to tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll turn it over to Ashley and Makayla and then we can get into the posters sure thanks Jess my name is Caitlin Richison I'm the current and outgoing chair of ECPN and I am currently an assistant conservator at the American Museum of Natural History I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and bring up the poster so out of respect for time I'm going to be going kind of fast because I'm going to be throwing out a lot of facts and figures at you but rest assured the last slide is going to include both a link to the single poster page and these slides as a PDF so today I'm going to be presenting some of the key takeaways from the 2018 ECPN compensation survey and I want to specifically preface that these are only a few of the takeaways from a very comprehensive survey which will hopefully soon be released after ECPN submits it for approval by the AIC board I also want to acknowledge that the bulk of this work was accomplished by the officers who came before me namely Eve Mayberger, Kari Reiner, Kat Fanning and Quinn Harris as well as the soon-to-be chair Jessica Betz Abel and myself who've been working to finish the long form report so as a quick introduction the survey was targeted I'm going to turn my camera off it's going a little slow sorry the survey was targeted for individuals who are citizens and or residents of the United States currently employed in the United States or attending graduate school for conservation in the United States at least 383 individuals accessed the survey form 369 responses were recorded for the first question and 16 respondents were instructed to exit the survey based on the selections to the first question which was are you a citizen of the United States or are you attending a graduate school within the United States while it's not possible to determine a definitive response rate various figures can be used to estimate the level of engagement so our response rate was approximately 20.7 percent or 311 out of 1500 which was calculated among members of AIC and so this survey came about in relation to the 2014 FAIC and AIC compensation survey so in 2014 this document was created AIC and FAIC conducted a general compensation survey which included extensive analytics that are helpful for understanding compensation levels across specializations geographic regions employment settings and years of professional experience the media are the AIC FAIC report includes median salary for professionals based on years of experience in the field grouping the data into five-year periods however the data is analyzed in relation to the position title such as fellow contract project conservator or assistant conservator so ECPN collected compensation data from published advertisements for postgraduate fellowships positions to support this data as well as our survey responses so first the demographics of our respondents 90.60 respondents self-identified as female while 7.12 responded self-identified as male and 1.71 identified as non-binary or third gender the age distribution was strongly concentrated between 21 to 40 years of age with 91.73 percent of respondents indicating that their age felt within this range respondents were also given the option to identify with more than one ethnicity by checking all that applied so each of these charts indicates the respondents by age the respondents by career stage and their self-identified ethnicity 79.5 percent of the emerging conservators who responded to the survey self-identified as white or Caucasian with the earlier career stages appearing to be slightly more diverse the second most prevalent group overall is Asian followed by Hispanic and white and Hispanic or Latin American each of the in addition to all of the comprehensive questions asked the respondents some of the survey was broken down into issues that affect the different demographic groups of emerging conservators such as pre-program graduate and postgraduate respondents some of the key questions for pre-program respondents dealt with their education how long they were employed and the level of supervision they were given education 78.96 percent of pre-program respondents indicated that they held an undergraduate degree 10.96 percent reported that they had a master's degree 4.11 percent as indicated that they had an associate's degree and 6.85 percent indicated that they had a high school diploma pre-program respondents were asked to indicate the number of conservation jobs or volunteer titles that they held including short-term positions such as contracts and the number of institutions in which they've worked the greatest percentage of pre-program respondents have held five or more titles 38.4 percent and worked in five or more institutions prior to entering into grad school supervision was also something we specifically asked pre-program students about as it was considered crucial among other forms of professional to gauge the level of pre-program candidates overall respondents were asked to agree or disagree with the statement I receive adequate supervision on a scale of one to five with one being strongly agree and five being strongly disagree as with pre-program respondents some of the key questions geared towards the graduate respondents were concerning education level and their employment during the graduate program when asked about their level of education 68.2 percent of graduate level respondents indicated that they held a master or a bachelor's degree and 29.5 percent indicated that they had a master's degree while entering grad school 69.77 percent of graduate student respondents indicated that they worked in a conservation related role in the United States in the 2018 calendar year during their academic tenure either during the academic year or over the summer 11.63 percent indicated that they had not worked in the conservation related role during the 2018 calendar year while 18.6 percent indicated that they worked in a conservation related position as a pre-program candidate prior to their enrollment in graduate school some of the key topics for post-graduates concerned employment and research ability at their current position respondents were asked for the number of conservation related positions job titles including their current position and short term positions such as contracts they held and the number of institutions they worked for since graduating their MAMS in conservation it was also considered critical to ask post-graduate respondents about their ability to conduct research at their current institution as this is one of the reasons why fellowships for instance are often cited as giving less pay because you're giving more research time so post-graduate respondents indicated that at in at least one conservation related position in 2018 that 53.46 indicated that they were able to research while 46.56 percent indicated that they were not of those who did indicate that they that their position involved research respondents were also asked whether they're given the amount of time needed to pursue and research in these positions 68.35 percent indicated yes that they agreed with that 28.78 percent responded no and 2.88 percent responded that this was not applicable in terms of titles pre-program graduate and post-graduate respondents were asked to give their position titles the majority of pre-program respondents at 41 percent and 38 percent respectively were either technicians or pre-program interns graduate respondents were most commonly academic year interns or summer interns and post-graduate respondents were most commonly conservation fellows at 23 percent conservators at 20 percent or assistant conservators at 18 percent the next few slides are going to dig in a little bit deeper into employment and benefits and compensation so termed positions of the 383 respondents 48.5 percent reported that their position was term limited when asked if they knew whether or not their position could be extended only 33 respondents were confident in this possibility while 62 were unable to extend and 64 did not know if this was even a possibility in terms of the hours worked few pre-program respondents were considered full-time employees or those who work 40 hours a week 40 percent of pre-program respondents were considered were not considered full-time and worked between five to 36 hours per week on average the majority of graduate and post-graduate respondents were considered full-time employees 70 percent of graduate respondents reported working 31 to 45 hours per week while 84 percent of post-graduates responded that they worked 31 to 51 and over hours per week the post-graduate respondents were then further asked whether they agreed whether they're agreed upon hours of work per week actually reflected their actual hours worked although 68 percent of post-graduate respondents thought their hours of work were accurate 26 percent thought that they worked more in terms of employment and unemployment the majority of survey respondents were employed in conservation related capacities in 2018 however some respondents reported periods of unemployment on average pre-program respondents spent two to six months unemployed while post-graduates respond respondents spent three to 12 plus months unemployed in terms of compensation overall 21.5 percent of respondents reported that they were compensated while eight percent of respondents specifically reported that they were not compensated of those who were not compensated pre-program respondents made up the majority of that eight percent when asked to specify the source of their compensation 18 percent reported that they were compensated directly by the employer company or institution where they worked and 3.7 percent reported that they were externally funded by an outside organization grant or funder such as a private endowment or the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation or Samuel H. Kress Foundation few respondents reported that their stipend hourly wage or salary increased slightly over time to account for inflation only 5 percent of respondents reported that their compensation was slightly increased annually while 7.2 percent reported that there was no increase and 5.5 percent were unsure in terms of salary transparency few respondents only 27 percent reported that a salary range was included in the job posting for the position they currently hold when job posting at when job postings advertise the salary range most respondents 11.5 percent reported that their actual salary reflected the salary range publicly posted in terms of negotiation 16.5 percent of overall respondents reported that they did not attempt to negotiate their starting salary only 5 percent of respondents reported that they negotiated their compensation package of those who did attempt to negotiate 4.6 percent reported that they were successful in their efforts while 7.4 percent reported that they were unsuccessful in negotiations the majority of respondents 57.5 percent of overall respondents were provided benefits from their place of work respondents were asked to rate their satisfaction with their current benefits of the respondents 45.8 percent strongly agreed that they were satisfied with their current benefits while 35.7 percent agreed 12.3 percent neither agreed nor disagreed and 5.7 percent disagreed meaning that they were unsatisfied with their benefits this is a fact that just mentioned earlier in the moderated panel but a majority of graduate and postgraduate respondents 62 percent and 60.5 percent respectively reported that they were required to move for position while 28 percent of pre-program respondents reported the same despite the high requirement of relocation few were given financial support to aid in the burden of relocating only 3 percent of pre-program 21 percent of graduate and 19 percent of postgraduate respondents were provided financial support for relocation this is another key fact supplemental income overall the majority of respondents reported the need to supplement their income consistent among pre-program graduate and postgraduate respondents was the reliance on familial or partner financial support or non-conservation based jobs these statistics uphold the long standing belief that conservation is really only a realistic field for those who can afford to pursue it in terms of financial security this was specifically written into the survey to gauge the respondents perception of their own financial security respondents were directed to indicate the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with the following statement I am able or it would be possible to live independently and fulfill basic needs such as the ability to pay for rent bills and food with the total annual salary or stipend I received through compensation employment in 2018 so the respondents were able to indicate how much they agreed with this on a scale of one to five when being strongly disagreeing and five being strongly agreed among the respondents clear trends emerged for each of the emerging conservator demographics nearly half of those in pre-program indicated that they would be unable to live independently and fulfill basic needs through conservation employment 41 percent of graduate students also selected this response although a greater number indicated that they neither agree nor disagree approximately half of the respondents from the postgraduate demographic indicated that they either agree or strongly agree that they would be able to live independently and fulfill basic needs through conservation employment sorry I meant to move to the slide earlier and here are the poster links so the first one is the single poster page for all of the information is crammed onto one poster and the second link is to the slides and now I will pass it off to Ashley and Mikayla thank you so much for that Caitlyn let me go ahead okay mine up all right hi everyone thank you so much for tuning into the ECPN poster presentation my name is Ashley Stanford I'm one of the ECPN outreach co-officers along with Mikayla Paulson as outreach officers we have the joy of overseeing the ECPN liaison program which is what this poster is all about this poster showcases the liaison program and highlights ways liaisons have collaborated grown served their communities promoted awareness of the field this term despite major obstacles to gather due to the pandemic the ECPN liaison program began as a way to connect emerging conservation professionals and forefront regions and has developed into a robust network with over 50 liaisons facilitating conversations support community throughout the country through a short and painless application process coordinated with us the outreach officers liaisons are selected to be a part of one of four distinct programs regional liaisons graduate school liaisons specialty group liaisons and committee and network liaisons regional liaisons cultivate local networks of ECPs and foster a sense of community they serve as ambassadors for ECPN within the larger conservation community and help to promote and distribute ECPN resources connecting with your regional liaison is a great way for ECPs at all stages from pre-program to recent graduates and fellows to connect with their peers the ECPN graduate liaisons facilitate the flow of information about their particular graduate programs from their perspective to you their fellow emerging conservators whether your pre-program or graduate of a different program or specialty they're here to help perfect prospective students are welcome to contact graduate liaisons with specific questions relating to student life and a student's perspective on the curriculum the graduate liaison highlight series which is started by ECPN outreach officers this term in 2020 interviews one graduate liaison each month to get more of a student's insight into the grad program and projects the application process for school and other helpful tools and resources for ECPs these interviews are available on the ECPN sub-site in the liaison news page within all AIC specialty group committee and networks are ECPN liaisons who facilitate communication and advocate for the larger ECP community these groups and networks can request liaison help on specific initiatives and are asked to present the ECPN update at the relevant business meetings the specialty group liaisons are a great resource for early stage ECPs to learn more about the ins and outs of that particular area of study this past year chris kanasen the textile specialty group liaison in madeline nihon conservator and private practice liaison hosted virtual lab tours with their respective specialty groups and also throughout the 2018 through 2020 terms outreach officers completed the specialty group liaison highlight series highlighting each liaison and their chosen specialty which are also available on the ECPN sub-site 2020 saw the expansion of the regional liaison network to include five new cities indianapolis indiana providence red island national definitely dallas texas and upstate new york and also port orico currently there are a total of 30 regional liaison positions six of which have co liaison teams going into the 2021 and 2022 term we'll be looking for many new liaisons to fill many of these roles lots of regional liaisons are off to graduate school which is very exciting so we'll be posting a call for open positions on the ECPN facebook page and online community so stay tuned for that okay lenni would also love to highlight some of the wonderful virtual events and programming liaisons have hosted and planned this term we ask regional liaisons to organize at least two local events as part of the position and the liaison network was really one of the first to come up with some really creative ways to stay connected even through social distancing roles on the poster here you can see have images of the texas wide wide bob ross sip and pain event the lab tour of in the conservation studio with sip and la regional liaisons and also the meet and greet meet the graduate liaisons virtual event another awesome virtual connection opportunity includes the san francisco mentorship program with local conservators in the area ucps organized by claire imma smith and laura gasia vaderan the san francisco regional liaisons the mentorship program was formed in response to cobit 19 lockdowns and it was a way to help match pre-program students struggling to find opportunities with virtual mentors in the bay area and interview with these two about their program can be found on the ECPN liaison news page and we share another one in the images here i have a few other events liaisons have hosted this term collaboration between liaisons exploded this year due to the virtual instead of physical locations of events the southeastern regional liaisons and atlanta columbian willingsburg hosted a joint portfolio night as did the boston providence regions boston dalis and houston liaisons hosted a texas wide conservators and private practice panel that spoke with conservators in various stages of their career about the ins and out of owning operating and working in private practice main groups have also hosted happy hours for ucps across city and state lines to network and talk about their experiences within the field additionally uh baronica macata olivera spela valentine iris are and mayuly census uh senti stabin have been busy translating ucp and resources into spanish and providing virtual events to connect latino conservators with ucp and in their ongoing series latinos and conservation journeys challenges and experiences these virtual connections and collaborative events have provided opportunities this year for ucps to connect with their peers and established conservators in oftentimes more relaxed environments average officers plan to continue offering the use of the ucp and zoom pro account so liaisons can maintain these opportunities we encourage you to reach out to your local regional liaison to connect with your peers and learn more about the field uh so thank you so much for your time today please let me know if you have any questions about the liaison program great thank you so much to all of our presenters in the poster session this afternoon