George
George
"There are lots of interesting jobs in museums I'd never thought about"
George has spent the last year creating this website.
I've done several different things since leaving university. I've worked for the government in London, taught English to teenagers in Italy, and done web design for various places.
As a kid I loved going to the Science Museum, pressing all the buttons, and watching things fall or spin or make sparks. Otherwise I've never been very interested in museums.
So when I joined the Whipple, it was mainly because I knew about web design and they were starting out on an exciting website project. It turns out there are lots of interesting jobs in museums - especially bigger museums - that I'd never thought about: web design, marketing, putting on events, outreach (getting people involved who might not otherwise visit), photography, graphic design and so on.
It's been a fun year. Because I've been responsible for a whole project from beginning to end, there's been a lot of different parts to it.
- At the start I had to work out what I was going to do with the year. This involved brainstorming, research, planning how to use my time here, and talking to various people inside and outside the museum.
- Then I had to learn some new skills. I already knew how to make databases and HTML pages. But I needed to find out about Macs, which is what we use here, and about Flash, which is what the Gallery Challenge activity is made with.
- After that I had some meetings with teachers, seeing what would be useful for them to use in classes.
- Finally, I got down to doing all the drawing, programming and writing/editing. As this went on, I also did some testing of the web site with young people to see how it could be improved, and made a few changes.
I hope you like the result.
