OMA 2024 Student Scholarship Blog - Kelsi Dwyer

The Ohio Museums Association is committed to connecting and empowering museum professionals at all stages of their career — including our student and emerging museum professionals!

For our 2024 OMA Annual Conference, OMA was very proud to offer students seeking careers in the museum field, scholarships to attend OMA 2024 in Sandusky.

We're continuing our 2024 Conference series with this week's post from Student Scholarship WInner, Kelsi Dwyer! Kelsi is a 3rd Year Student at Arizona State University studying online for a Bachelor’s in Museum Studies. She currently works as the Member & Visitor Services Coordinator for the National Museum of the Great Lakes.

Did you miss our previous Conference Blog post? Learn more about the Conference Blog series and read our previous entry here.

Let's Talk About Hard Conversations: OMA Conference From the Emerging Professional Perspective

As a first year conference goer, the 2024 Ohio Museums Association Conference was an impressive introduction into the world of business conferences. The optional activities, such as the Saturday Shore & Island Tours and the Sunday museum tours, allowed newer attendees a chance to network in a more comfortable and open environment while being linked to more accomplished attendees through a shared experience. The Monday sessions included a variety of topics that were different enough to give all attendees something to enjoy, but similar enough to all relate to this year’s theme: Sustainability. As an emerging museum professional myself, I could not imagine a more suitable theme for my first conference. The big questions this year’s conference looked to answer was, “How do we keep our museums alive and thriving? How do we become more sustainable?” A daunting question for many in the museum field. However, the Keynote Speaker this year, Steve Zimmerman, took those questions and dove headfirst into the deep end, a feat many would fear to do.

Although a handful of listeners showed twisted faces of tension and nerves, many in the audience were eagerly attached to every word of the intense speech. Steve’s talk delved into the need for discussions about proper compensation, treatment in the workplace, and the current toxicity that is plaguing museum professional environments everywhere. He opened up on the importance of having conversations about these difficult topics, building trust within your team, and creating sustainability by promoting a healthy environment from the ground up. If museums are to continue growing, thriving, and existing, they need to learn how to view the entire picture of what it means to be a museum. That includes treatment of ALL employees, interactions with visitors, partnerships with local communities, and visibility about where their donation money is coming from. One of my key takeaways from this much needed hard conversation about hard conversations was that museums cannot expect themselves to be sustainable if they are unwilling to be open to change.

Overall, Steve Zimmerman’s keynote discussion let me leaving with a lot of thoughts to chew on. It left me with a drive to become a force that helps my own museum push towards that goal of being sustainable. And it also left me excited to see that someone who does not identify with being a Emerging Museum Professional was listening to what we were saying in regards to treatment of employees, and was encouraging more people to speak up. The OMA Conference was an experience I am overjoyed to have taken part in, I’m extremely grateful for the scholarship that allowed me to attend, and even more grateful to Johnna for putting everything together and trusting me enough to capture these moments as the volunteer photographer. I encourage each of you to attend future OMA events, and I also encourage you to start those conversations at your museums that some may be too afraid to begin.