 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the webinar series of the Emerging Conservation Professionals Network, or ECCN, a network of the American Institute for Conservation. My name is Emma Hartman, and I am one of the digital platforms' officers for the 2019-2020 term. Today's webinar is entitled, Navigating the Workplace and Harnstein Community as an Emerging Conservation Professional, a panel discussion. This webinar is the second in a series of ECCN educational programs generously supported by the Department of Art Conservation at the University of Delaware in honor of Bruno Puglia. ECCN is grateful to the University of Delaware for this opportunity to celebrate Bruno's legacy as a mentor and educator and to commemorate his passion for the conservation profession. For more information, please see the announcement on the ECCN community. I'd like to take a moment to briefly share information about ECCN and our webinar series. ECCN is a network within AIC that is dedicated to supporting conservation professionals in the first stages of their careers. Please visit our page on the AIC website, our Facebook page, or our Wiki of resources for emerging conservators for more details about our activities. ECCN has an ongoing interview series with conservators and specializations that require particular training. On the ECCN blog, you can find recent ECCN interviews with conservation professionals who specialize in the care of library and archival materials, wooden objects, East Asian art, and electronic media. You can also find ECCN interviews with United States citizens who trained abroad and are currently practicing conservation in the U.S. And now a bit about our webinar series. ECCN organizes two webinars each year on topics relevant to emerging conservators. Our webinars are all recorded and the full videos are available on the AIC YouTube channel. If you have ideas for future webinar topics, feel free to contact ECCN at the email you see on the screen or post suggestions on the ECCN Facebook group. And now about further ado, I'd like to introduce our two speakers for today's webinar in navigating the workplace and harnessing community as an emerging conservation professional. Anisha Gupta is the Assistant Conservator for Archival Materials of the American Philosophical Society, APS in Philadelphia. She's also Co-Chair of the AIC's Equity and Inclusion Committee and Co-Chair of the Philadelphia Area Conservation Association. Leslie Ransick-Ate is the Owner and Principal Objects Conservator at the Art Conservation Group in New York. She's worked in private practice and for major museums since 1981. She's an occasional lecturer at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center and is a fellow of the American Institute for Conservation. For more detailed biographies for our speakers, please visit the blog post regarding this webinar on AIC's online community. Today, Anisha and Leslie will be responding to discussion topics and questions submitted by emerging conservation professionals to ECCN's Digital Platforms team. We'd like to thank you all for submitting such excellent discussion questions. If you have additional questions during the program, please do submit them via the chat function on the left of your screen during the webinar and we will return to them at the end of the program. I'd now like to turn it over to our speakers, Anisha and Leslie, to begin the program. Thank you. Sorry, go ahead, Leslie. No, I said thank you. This is Leslie's voice. Anisha, go ahead. Yes, and this is Anisha's voice, so hopefully you guys can keep track of us. And we received a lot of really great questions which we're going to try to answer during this webinar. Before we dive into those questions, though Leslie and I thought it would be really helpful to start with this first topic, setting expectations in your workplace. As we were going through the questions, we kind of kept coming back to some key ideas, so we thought we would summarize those right up front so that we can reference them as we go through the program. So the first one is really beginning at the interview stage. So Leslie, do you want to start with that? Yeah, thanks. When you show up and you've made contact with the conservator and you've shown up and are hoping to be taken on as a volunteer or intern at the pre-program stage, it's a great time to get a feel, use your intuition to sort of feel what's the place like? Does it feel like a place you want to be in? What's the communication? How does it feel to communicate with this person who will be my supervisor? And as you're doing that, paying attention to the interview and how they talk about the institution and the other people you work with, does it feel good? Does it feel negative? Is this really a place you want to be? It's also a time to, you know, you're trying to gauge how it'll feel to be there. And then to go right into talking with the possible supervisor is what are you going to do when you're there? Are you going to be doing desk work all the time, bench work all the time? What can you expect when you show up? Do you want to go into that a little bit, Anisha? Yeah, so setting expectations when you start the position, so it's going to happen during the interview or right when you start the position is really important. So asking questions about the types of projects you're going to work on and saying what I'd really like is portfolio projects or what are the kinds of things that you want to learn? Because I think sometimes you're in, especially if it's a short term like internship or fellowship, you're kind of a few months in when you realize, you know, this isn't, I'm not really getting what I want out of it and it's kind of hard to bring that up. So something that Leslie and I talked about which I really liked was setting up at the beginning what you want out of the position, kind of taking ownership over that. And then following that, also set up specific like time intervals to check in right from the front to see that these expectations are being met on both sides. So say, you know, once every six weeks I'd really love to just check in and talk about the progress I'm making and when I go over the projects I've been doing or whatever. But you don't have to go through kind of that awkwardness of having asked for that meeting and make it a bigger deal maybe than you wanted to. I think that would really help. One thing I also want to add that I was thinking about is that when you're going into places, like when I have people who come here and want to be volunteers and they have a little bit of experience but not a tremendous amount, it's sort of like a trade. They're volunteering and they're getting my time and they're getting my conservator's time. So it's very important to us to make sure that the volunteer is getting what they need out of the situation in the same way because we're putting time into it, we really want the intern or volunteer to do the work that we want them to do, that they're qualified to do that we brought them in to do. So it's a bit of a trade and I find that the communication helps a great deal across both because we don't want the interns or the volunteers, some of the work might not be terribly exciting. So we'll balance that with something that's very exciting. So we want to make sure that that's happening, that the people who we have here are getting what they need while also helping us because we're a private practice and we do need help. And one other thing that we talked about was the generational divides that you often find in labs. And I think I would say to that is think about those generational divides, consider them, but I would also like to think about the great things that can come from working across generations. I think in a lot of labs you're seeing millennials, Gen X and boomers all in one lab and I think that we can all gain so much from talking to each other. So if you're a millennial like I am, think about what skills you have that you can bring into the lab that might be really useful and some of them are kind of cliche but social media and doing some magic work on an Excel spreadsheet or Word document or even just like connecting with some of the quote-unquote younger departments that might be in your institution like education, marketing, social media. Think about those kind of other things that you bring in because of where you are and the things that you can learn from all of the years of experience that are around you and I would say try not to be cranky about that. It can be really easy to be like, oh you don't even know what I'm talking about and I'm talking about a TikTok video or whatever, which I have to say is not my generation. But there's so much that we can learn from each other and I think we should be mindful of the fact that we are all coming from different places. I think the idea of the generational divide is going to come up many times in the next hour. And I second Anisha's thought which is that both I at the end of the boomer generation and others who I don't even know what they call the new generations. But we have to embrace all of them and I have to embrace yours as well as you embracing mine and as much positivity and curiosity about our different places and our different understandings of how the world works is only going to increase the benefit all the way around through your internship and onwards with your career, not to preach. All right, yes. We go on to the next first set of questions. Right, so this is where we got, I think, some of the greatest number of questions. So we will put three of these questions there and I think we'll just go to them one by one. So the first is how can a new conservator go about enacting needed changes in their workplace when faced with coworkers of highly entrenched and potentially incorrect opinions and ways? Do you want to hear that one? Well, this question addresses so many different things. The first thing is you're new to a situation, so what might seem highly entrenched may or may not be. Potentially incorrect may or may not be. It's someone coming on you to say what's bothering you and to start the conversation whether it's with just another conservator sitting next to you or going to your supervisor. Again, it goes back to dialogue and before you can enact or make a change in a situation, you need to understand it fully and that comes from questioning. It comes from curiosity and if it's a treatment that's being done all the time and you feel that there's a problem with it, why do you feel that there's a problem and have you asked all the questions of the person who's doing it or teaching you about why they're doing it this way? There can be many different reasons because this is the way the lab has done it forever and there perhaps you have an opening to discuss other possibilities. There could also be monetary and time constraints that you don't know about that you should know that you can then be told about and that can help you understand why a treatment like being done one way. Again, it goes back to having the conversation and then that should hopefully allow you to start working towards positive solutions. If you find that there's just no way but you're going to be able to change someone's mind, with your in and institution, I would find others who are more like-minded. If you're someone who is having ins, I'm sure that you'll hear your coworkers talking and you'll find other people who have your attitude. It might not change what's happening in your direct lab but I think it can do a lot for your morale to find other people at your institution that believe in what you're doing and then maybe you can ask them for advice on how to introduce new ideas or create change. If it's something even bigger than just one person then you kind of have found those other people and they know your situation because they work at your institution. You can try to start creating change by banding together and finding the people who do have those opinions. I guess I wanted to bring up some of these other questions we're talking about treatment which is kind of a different situation where people in other departments might not be as useful. The second question there is how do you navigate conflicting opinions for treatment between colleagues in your department? As a least senior person it can be difficult to assert my opinion on treatment particularly when it is in direct conflict with what a more senior person may recommend so a less invasive treatment versus a more intervention treatment. I can start with that by saying to build on what Leslie was saying about open communication so learning to talk about your opinion without negating someone else's I think is really valuable especially in these types of situations so to be respectful of what other people are thinking and especially in the treatment just asking why, why is this your approach or why is this the material you're using and you may come out of it thinking, oh this is something that makes a lot of sense given this reasoning and you learn something about it helps you understand the approach that they're taking and it also creates space for this type of dialogue so you're kind of modeling the kind of behavior that you would want to see as well like creating open dialogue and you might start changing lab culture just by modeling what you are hoping is happening. I would also add that sometimes when you're coming into a new situation and you don't quite know what the ground is that you're standing on it can take a certain amount of nerve to start talking about something like this to step into an unknown situation either in treatment or in how a lab is run but I have to say that with people that I bring into my lab one of the reasons we do it is because we do get quote, not entrenched I guess but we get, you know we start, we keep doing things over and over again the same way and whether or not it's paperwork that we're doing the same way or managing a project or doing a treatment we do get stuck in a rut and so we actually encourage volunteers and students who work here to speak up because we can't necessarily see the things that you can see so while it might seem weird to say well why do you do your paperwork that way it might be like oh wow it is really sort of strange that we do our paperwork that way the person might have a very good idea and make us start thinking about things in a different way so do have the nerve to speak up, do, you know again it's that balance between being too cocky and actually realize that you do know something and you do have something to offer because of my experience people do I was just going to say it might feel a little awkward so as Anisha says talking to people in different departments if it's a museum or if you're in a small situation sort of finding who might be good to have lunch with and talk your things through with go for it. Yeah as a newer conservator myself I will say like I graduated a few years ago and it's hard to be confident in your own skills especially your treatment skills maybe you just don't have the breath of experience that your colleagues might you have to weigh your confidence against your experience and how comfortable you feel and certainly ask for help when you need it but also don't always second guess yourself you know like it can be scary but you have to also think about building your own confidence and maybe you do know something you know some newer technique or even just the way we look at treatments has changed over time so being open about that but also being confident in yourself you have to balance. I would say specifically to people who have come out of school recently and are at that stage you are so much closer to the recent literature the active conversations in classes than I am you know I have more experience but I don't I teach in one of the reasons I do that is so that I can stay on top of the literature otherwise I don't have the time. So you guys have information that I just don't have yet you know and if you've heard about a new way to do something that is something I want from you I want your information I want your thoughts about it I want the the literature citing I rely on the young conservators for that and also the excitement that you bring to things because it is new and I think there's a mixture I don't know about the second guessing I think I still second guess myself all the time so I don't know how you're going to stop doing that. But you know what I mean I mean I think it's if you've made it into one of the programs you've gone through this school then you obviously there's a certain level of intellect that you have and that you're bringing to the plate and to the table and that is something that if you're not in an environment where they want to encourage you to bring that out then you have to question the environment you're in and whether it is a good place for you to be working. Yeah that's the perfect segue into the last part of this of these questions which is how do you cope with colleagues and your supervisors who may seem disengaged from their work, and just shrinking financial support, complacent with negativity in the workplace, and dismissive of enthusiasm or curiosity. Yeah. I mean that's just so sad when I read that question. I don't know where that person who wrote that question is working. I know. I think so we don't know who this person is we don't even know what level they're at but I'm positive they're not getting paid enough to be in a situation like this, especially if you're pre-programmed and you feel like I need this reference, I need this experience in our kind of conversations before this Leslie you said like it's not going to help you to work in a non-curious place and that just really sticks with me. Conservatives are curious and interested in their work if not enthusiastic and so it's going to be hard to build a strong portfolio working in this type of environment and it's certainly not going to be fun but if you feel like you have to say in this situation I would go back to what we were saying earlier which is like find ways to boost your morale like finding other people who are excited about this work and have more of your attitude. If you're in a really, you know, a private lab or this is your direct supervisor then I would start looking for other work I think I would definitely start, yeah I would absolutely start looking for other work and I would also, you know, if you're not getting the curiosity at work then at least try and get the bibliography for the things that you can read that can feed your curiosity as you're looking for other work because if you're in a pre-programmed place that curiosity when you go to apply for a program any of the programs is they want your curiosity and they want to see that you're out there and doing the reading and doing the looking and when you go in for your interview you're not expected to know everything you know, why would you bother going to school if you did but they are expecting, so you know they are expecting to see you reaching out of yourself and if you're, the situation that you're in as far as a pre-programmed internship if not feeding you that then you need to feed yourself and go get the information yourself and I don't, I honestly don't know yeah, sorry. Well maybe to be more optimistic I would say you don't want to kill your own curiosity and enthusiasm so I would bring that to the table as much energy as you can master every day and see if it becomes more contagious I'm thinking, exactly, you might have already tried this but you know, I am an overly enthusiastic person often and I have gone into job interviews and felt like I was the loudest person in the room and maybe I was scaring people around me and I just thought, you know what, heads are going to get in the lab so if they don't like that then it's just not going to work out and I do think that you're hunger for all of this information can be really contagious and you should use that and hopefully the people around you will be reminded of why they got into this work and there's got to, yeah, so so good luck to you, writer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also remember that one of the things that struck me as you were talking is that one of the reasons not to stay in a situation like that is that even though it looks like it takes forever to become a conservator, you're actually the process of becoming a conservator is so thick with information that you have to gather that not that you're wasting your time in a place I guess I'm saying like do your own research dig into things if you're in a situation where someone else is defeating you but also you do every minute counts as you decide to become a conservator because it takes so many years to get to a place where you realize that you don't know everything and to be confident about that just where you get a few years out of school and to be able to embrace that and say this is great I'm going to feel like I don't know everything. So if you're in a situation that's really pretty bad I guess just try and find other people get on the blog so they can find other people that you can talk to about it. Yeah, definitely. And the ECPN forum is one place your ECPN regional liaison does meet up. If you have a regional liaison you can reach out you could become a regional liaison and find other people like you pitch the ECPN program there. But yeah, come out and find us because we're everywhere. I'm going to add one cautionary thing which is that this is a very, very small field and we sort of all get to know each other eventually although it is getting bigger. So if you're having a problem in a specific situation with one person or a group of people be very cautious about naming names to other people. You know, don't, you know, accept the idea that maybe it's just you in the situation that's not working. Do not place blame on other people. Does that make sense, Anisha? Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It is a very small field. So, you know, kind of find solidarity but maybe not vent to those same people. Yes, I think that's it. You know, it's just you don't... Other people. Yeah, be aware of that. So these are people that you might run into many times over your career and you want to stay in, you know, you want to stay in their good graces and they should want to stay in your good graces as well even if you don't agree about everything. All right, should I... Any last thoughts before we move on to the next section? Yeah, I think moving on to... No, I think it's good. Yeah, okay. And I guess I'll say... I can't remember if Emma said this or not, but if you have questions, you can, I think, chat them to us, message it into the chat, and if we have time at the end, we'll get to it. Otherwise, we'll get to it afterwards. We'll write a blog post. So the next couple questions are related to compensation. So the first question is, if you have been asked to interview for a job that the salary range was not posted in the original listing, is it appropriate to ask for it at this stage, particularly if you're likely to be interviewing at other institutions? Leslie, do you want to get started? Yeah, my initial reaction is that, yes, it's absolutely appropriate to ask what the range of the salary is. You should also be ready for someone to say, we won't tell you now. Great. I think, at least in my institutional experience, that if it's not posted, they generally don't give it to you until they make you an offer. But we think it doesn't hurt to ask, and there shouldn't be any repercussions from asking, like revoking your interview or anything like that. I think it's fair to ask. Right, and in my situation, in the private world, depending on whether it's a pre-program or a student or an intern, then I am more than willing to discuss because the salary is very commensurate to skills or skill sets that the person might be being hired for. And again, it goes back to what I said at the very beginning, which is it depends what the person is coming in for, what the trade is, I guess, for using a skill that you have that you're strong in and then giving you a conservation experience on the other side. I certainly am going to pay you for your skill. But I might not pay you for the teaching that I'm doing for treatment, and so we come up with a price that works for me as a business owner and you as someone who's putting time into something and needs to get paid. Again... Go ahead. I was just going to say we should bring in the second question because it kind of expands this a little bit. The second question is, is it okay to negotiate any fellowship offer as you would a job offer? Many of us fear repercussion of asking for a higher salary, most often stemming from the perception that we should just be thankful for getting a fellowship in the first place or the possibility that an offer may be revoked for simply asking for more compensation. Yeah, so I feel strongly about this. There's a lot in here. So yeah, I would negotiate a fellowship offer and I know it's often an endowment or a grant or some sort of pot of money, but I would still negotiate the fellowship offer as you would a job offer. It's often many years. It includes health benefits. There's a lot to it. It looks and walks and talks like a job, so I would negotiate like a job. If you're worried about, well, they said they only have this much money, there are other things. I would first try to negotiate the salary for sure. If you're not getting far negotiating the salary, then consider what else you can negotiate. So your days off, your education and research time, working a flexible schedule, think about the things that you need to make your work life better, your personal life better, and what they can do that then wouldn't cost. If they don't have the salary, money, what else they can do for you? I agree with that completely. I also think that it's going to take years for the fellowship. I mean, fellowship has come up significantly over the arc of my career and over the arc of your career, they will continue to rise because people need to keep working on it. And that's the only way it is going to rise. And I also think that by asking about and negotiating, we'll help that happen. If people are vocally taking issue with what's being offered as a whole group of people, then it'll have to be listened to and changes will have to be made. And I guess another thing that I forgot to say is that you could also negotiate, like if it's year one, year two, the cost of living adjustment, I think they're going to go up where you live. That's a much smaller amount of money for them to give you. Yeah, I think all your ideas are good. And especially the, I guess, all of them, I think are good. And be as creative as you can. And do you bring it to the institution? The second sentence of this, I'm happy that we're bringing these types of issues to the forefront. 84% of institutions or something like that, a very large percent of institutions, at least for jobs that don't have dollars or numbers, expect you to negotiate. I just want to make sure that we do a little myth busting. If they expect you to negotiate, they're not going to revoke the position. Maybe, and I don't know about fellowship, so maybe they don't expect you to negotiate a fellowship as much. But when you reach that point and they've offered it to you, they've spent a lot, invested time and money, staff time, resources into interviewing people and have determined that you're the one. So you are at, you have leverage in this moment. So take advantage of that. So we should just be thankful for getting a fellowship or a job or internship or graduate school. No, you worked really, really hard to get here. I know you did. And you deserve this. And we have to really get rid of this attitude that Locke has anything to do with it. I also would, can I interrupt one second? When you're applying for a fellowship, it might say just right up front, what are they now? Are they giving you $30,000? This is a $30,000 fellowship. So you knew up front. It is more now? That's great. I think even up to 50, some of the more expensive cities. That's good, that's good. So you know immediately, they're going to say, well, you knew what the salary was when you applied. And that's where you start getting creative. Well, maybe it's not cash that you need, but days off to go do research or whatever you can come up with that will help you be thrilled about having a fellowship. And we could go on about compensation forever. And so instead, I co-authored Blockhouse with Ariel O'Connor and Jen Lynch, which is it's listed below. If you Google it, you should be able to find it, where we talk a lot more about like why you should negotiate, how you should negotiate, how to negotiate a federal job versus other positions and lots of resources. So if you're feeling unsure, we try to compile everything that we could come up with and we certainly welcome comments and feedback and much more discussion because there's just so much to talk about here. Yeah, that's a good blog. All right, should we go on to the next one? Yeah, I think your blog kind of covers quite a bit. Yeah, we tried to cover everything that we could and hopefully it's a jumping off point for people. Yeah. Okay, health and safety. So if you are a fellow student, crew programmer, or recently emerged conservator, experience health safety violation in a private practice setting, what is the most effective way to address this problem? There's a couple of layers here. First of all, if you know there's a problem, you obviously immediately do what's necessary. If it's an active problem, it's an active situation. Do what you feel is necessary to take the danger away and if it's not quite that active or when you're finished addressing it, you go to a supervisor and you explain what's going on. And one of the things, I was talking to someone about this yesterday, one of the issues is many of the pre-programmers don't know what's a dangerous situation. They may be asked to work with materials that they really shouldn't be working with or don't know how to work with properly. I'm not quite sure and they won't realize it. And I didn't know any issue if you had anything to speak to that because in certain situations it is up to the supervisor to explain the dangers of working with a certain solid and say that the pre-program person might not know about and I'm not quite sure how that can be avoided or what to do about that sort of situation. If you don't know, you're presented with a situation where you have to use solvents or something and you don't know but you know that there's potentially a problem. I do think the ASC Health and Safety Committee has lots of great resources. I print out a bunch of them and put them around our female. What gloves do you use? They have an extensive glove guide which to me is always quite confusing. Which respirator to use? What kind of PPE you need in general in different situations? So I think if you're unsure and you don't feel like you can ask your supervisor, it's not really part of the culture of the lab. I would peruse their Wiki or website. Look at their resources and even just finding the safety data sheets which are pretty easy if you Google, we'll tell you at least what levels you're looking at. So do your own research. And I would, one of those moments where you just have to kind of be confident in what you know is right and what you need and ask for the respirators or just put on the gloves or do what you need to do even if that's not what everyone around you is doing. If you don't know, I mean if you don't even know that you're supposed to wear gloves, I'm not sure what to do about that. I'm not quite sure. I'm going to take this a little bit away from the question which is health and safety, I've read into people earlier in their career who aren't really taking their health and safety quite as carefully as I want them to. Everything from when you're using a small amount of solvent and you're at your desk, you leave the cap off. Well, it might not bother you, but if it doesn't bother you, think about the person at the next desk. It might bother them. If someone comes over to you and says you really should be wearing a mask, an N95 mask when you're doing this, don't shrug it off. Maybe you really should. When you're young and heartier and you haven't been exposed to all that much, you're pretty young and hearty, but you can become overexposed to many of the materials that we work with very, very quickly. And that's a permanent thing. If you use epoxy the wrong way for too long and smell it too often, you can become sensitized to it and you can never go into a room with epoxy again. I speak from experience for something because I am the canary in my lab because I have been over-sensitized to certain things. But I guess my thing is that when people do say something about health and safety, take it seriously. If it doesn't seem like it's all that big a deal, oh, there's always mildew in my bathroom when I was growing up and it never bothered me, so why should I worry about being on a mold site? Well, you should be. And you should listen to the advice. Yeah. So I guess now I'm sort of forgetting where we started, but... No, I'm sorry. Yes, I took the time. Definitely a second. Sorry. No, that was great. But I just want to make sure we say, talk to your direct supervisor. I don't think there's anything... I think the theme of the seminar is open communication. And I don't think there's anything like the health and safety committee can do for you or OSHA, unless you're at a very high level. And if you're at that level of contacting OSHA, I think you need to leave the situation. And then it sounds like it's very unsafe if they're not going to... I would like, you know, when you're going into a new situation, also you can ask if they have a mass creed. You don't have your own mask respirator. And I've considered, for one, you can ask them about being fitted, which is complicated, but at least having one that you can use. And ask them to explain the situation to you. Ask them what sort of venting they have. You know, especially in a small lab, you know, private place, like what do they do and how do they deal with things and how can I be smart about it? Right. Again, proactive communication. Yeah, exactly. Like doing this right at the beginning or even in the interview and just getting a sense of how this new lab talks about health and safety too. You know, we'll tell you everything you need to know about what it'll be like to work there then. Yeah, I think that's, again, hit it before it happens. Yeah. It just avoids, like, awkward conversations later. All right. I'm going to go on to what I think is the last topic, equity and inclusion. So what are the best ways to find community within the profession as a person of color, especially since the conservation labs we work in are predominantly white institutions? So I'm going to give advice based on exactly what I did to answer this question. So I reached out to my network and, you know, talked to people, because I didn't really have an answer is that I am South Asian American and I think it was just, like, a really great question that really centers around, like, having to build on relationships. So I think, like, the technology we have these days helps us really create and maintain relationships that are really spread out all over the country and all over the world. And that's what it's going to take right now if you want to have this community. It's going to be pretty spread out. And it can be hard. I mean, it can be really hard to create these spaces. So I would say, like, be open and creative about how you create this network for yourself and it really depends on how you identify it can be as a person of color or LGBTQ or, you know, whatever kind of community that you're looking for. Like, if you're working at an institution, if they look outside the conservation department, in my experience, the education and, like, social media departments are often the most diverse departments and they're also bringing in more diverse audiences. So that can be a really fruitful place that you can look. But you can even look further out than that, like, within the larger cultural heritage community, like emerging museum professional groups or nearby university groups or even just, you know, away from cultural heritage. So, you know, you're getting a little bit further from that. But, yeah, so I would say, like, so I would say the main thing is you're going to have, it's going to take effort on your part to build these relationships and you're going to have to sort of, I think, find them where you can, what makes sense in your situation. But just thinking about equity and inclusion in general as a topic, I think in conservation we focused a lot on racial equity and a little bit more on gender equity. And I think, like, if we, we should be thinking about, like, moving the whole field forward, you know, kind of creating a community network that is for everyone and think about who we're leaving out and not, you know, thinking about access and accessibility and disability issues or classism or, you know, just thinking more broadly about who we mentor and how we mentor them and what they need and just being really open about these issues in general, I think is also really important. So, at the bottom, I found one resource that actually found just that I use myself, Five Tips for Finding Community, The Person of Color Arts Professional, which has some interesting things and also, like, links that'll take you to other places. So, I hope that'll be helpful. Thank you. Yeah. So, that's actually the end of the topics that we had. And so, I am going to turn it back over to Emma and see if we've got any questions during the webinar or how we're going to wrap it up. Thanks. Thank you so much, Anisha and Leslie. Yeah, we've received a few questions through our Google Form that we sent out prior to the webinar. And the first is about salary dissociation in a private practice. The participant wrote, I recently entered my first job in a medium private practice. From what I've gathered, my parallel colleagues with one to three years of experience are making a yearly salary of $10,000 plus more than mine. The trade is much more aligned with local norms of institutional conservative positions and unfortunately, I did not feel that I could negotiate the job offer up due to other circumstances. Is this large pay gap typical in private practice work? And how can I respectfully approach a new negotiation with our director? How can I advocate for a pay raise when I'm still beginning to build my experience level and my track record? I'll speak to that. I think that it's very important to talk to your supervisor or your boss about the situation and your personal situation and what you need. I don't think it's ever too early. Well, let's say, I mean, you need to advocate for yourself and you need to be in communication with your supervisor or the person that's deciding the salary and talk about how to get you to where you need to be and how... I guess I wouldn't address the gap between you. You can bring it up. I wouldn't harp on that. I would bring it more to how you and your boss can get you to where you need to be in the best and quickest way possible. I have no idea why the salary is so different than other people in your basic same situation, but it clearly is a problem so you need to address it. And you should have any ideas to that. Yeah, I agree. I think you have to address it and I think you just have to bring it up. I think that's the beginning. Did the person just start? Yeah, I guess they just started the job but I guess my thing is, don't as a boss, I love it when people come to me with creative ways and with both specific information and creative paths to get to that solution. So your salary is $10,000 less than it should be compared to other people who are there. So how can you and over how many years is it going to take to get you to be a parity with other people at the same stage? Also, it depends on what packages people have. There are packages where someone can have health insurance, someone might not or there's a different type of health insurance or there's all sorts of different things that go into the package that someone gets so I would talk to the supervisor about that and how to make yours work without more information I can't say. And you should sound like the other people who just had two other people had significantly more salary at the same stage. Yeah, I mean that's really difficult and I think it's important that people are there isn't that much of a gap in one situation because it ends up creating with this hierarchy and I think and I haven't worked in private practice and I know it's harder with a smaller lab but I think that you have to I think you I think you should Sorry, it's tricky. I think you have to think about that gap. I mean it's like why are you getting paid less of those people if you're in the same or similar position and I know that's a really hard discussion to have and this is where I like to bring in data of what other people are making in the city at the same level and some people in your own lab but I think it's going to be a civil conversation but I think you have to bring this up of like what can we talk about this and why we're sort of in this position and how can we work through this. Yeah, I think you have to be a partner in working through it because as a private business I can tell you there are all sorts of reasons because there's more money sometimes than other times and So having that frank discussion is important Yes, well and do things up, you know Absolutely, the frank discussion is absolutely important and you need the employee needs the information in order to feel good about what they're doing and in order to know that this is the place where that could be and that they're going to be paid in equal manner and how they're going to get to that place Yeah, talk to your supervisor. Alright, thank you both. Our next question is about navigating relationships with co-workers that might not be directly within the conservation field. The cigarettes that occasionally conservators can be typecast as people who are constantly saying no to things and they're wondering how might you best go about building working relationships with those people who might not entirely understand the conservation field? Hmm Yeah Well I would say again, like get creative about how to get them excited about conservation, so inviting those people to your lab like all the time to come over and see the projects you're doing or a really neat thing you're working on even doing more formal things that maybe you have before your business party or holiday party you do an open house in the conservation lab where people can come in what you see or you work in small sites and you feel more comfortable sending out little missives like oh this is a really interesting thing I'm working on and thinking about so those are all kind of like the outreach sides of it and I have to say you have to do it many times and it's not that people aren't interested it's really about not having time or missing that time window sometimes I'm doing a really cool gel treatment or washing or something really dramatic and I tell people from 10 to 12 I'll be working on this so stop by if you're in the area and take a look at what this is and it just gets people invested in what you're doing in a different way so I think that can be soft and showing people what you do and that you're open to the rest of the institution and their input but then if there's certain departments that maybe you want to collaborate with or you want to turn this idea around about the conservator I would you can be more direct and talk to them about what they would hope to get from treatments in the conservation department or you can pay really good attention to the kinds of things that they're working on and how you could help them get to where they want to go like if it's a curator and you offer up using the microscope or something like that which could help them with their work or just ways that getting created with ways that observation could help this department and rebuilding that relationship that you are very open and then when you do have to say no it kind of comes from a different place than it may have before I agree with all of that as inclusive as you can show people the things you're doing I think I missed part of the question Yeah, about conservators often saying no I think trying to turn that image around Oh, okay I find again that to be odd so well I mean our job is I find my job is nothing but education and I have a great deal of fun talking about it and trying to find out what in my toolkit can help other people in the museum and help the conservation what can the registrar do what can the photographer do what can the curator do we have so much information that feeds all of those different jobs all the different parts of the museum that I think opening up your lab until people are doing a gel treatment is a great sort of thing I often have my dino light and I show people what things look like why am I just doing this surface well this is what it actually looks like I think it's clean, it's not things like that we have a whole realm of information and is great thank you both those are really really great responses I think we have time for about one more question this last question is do you have any suggestions or particular considerations for individuals working in smaller workplaces who might not necessarily have HR departments when they are dealing with a situation that traditionally might require going to an HR department it's a very broad question yeah I because I don't have an HR department we deal with things in lots of different ways yeah I think I mean I think I think knowing I'm kind of saying knowing your rights but sort of like knowing what is allowed and what is not allowed you know like thinking about health and safety and things like what is where's the line and how to deal with that knowing what you're kind of entitled to is important so that if you feel like there's an issue since you're not going to be making that with HR though I will say like HR is good and is important but it's not it's they're working for the employer often I mean you know there's kind of a balance with HR you have to be careful with HR as well no matter what situation you're in it's really important to know what your rights are in the workplace and if you want to lodge a complaint whether it's with HR or not it's important to bring in that evidence to say and it doesn't need to be like you know you're putting someone on trial but just being confident that what you're going into is you know these are the reasons why you're bringing this up so whether you're citing like maybe an employee handbook or just basic you know a safety data sheet health and safety kind of requirement or what it is just kind of having a clear argument that you present will also just help you be more confident in bringing up something that's likely uncomfortable yeah and I also to say that just in a small situation it can be very difficult there can be clashes between people that are more than they should be there can be I don't know there's just so many possibilities and all I can do is go back to take care of yourself and open communication as best as possible and again without knowing what the particular issue is I don't know that I can speak to more specifically than that great thank you both it looks like we're just about out of time but we will be posting a follow-up blog post with all the resources that our speakers today mentioned on the eCPN AIC online community and I'd really like to thank our audience for joining us today if you have any additional questions or suggestions for future webinar topics please email our team at eCPN.aic.digitalplatforms at Gmail and I'd also really like to sincerely thank our speakers for participating today in this webinar it's been a very wonderful discussion and your contributions to the topic have been really valuable thank you as well for the rest of the eCPN officers and the AIC for helping to organize and promote this event thank you are we off air has left a conference