<p>I am a junior in high school and have decided that I want to pursue art history as my undergraduate major. Assuming all goes well, I would like to intern at prestigious museums, get into grad school, and earn a Ph.D in art history. My dream is to be a curator working for a NYC museum.</p>
<p>That being said, I want to attend a college that has a great art history program. I'm into humanities, so I'd like a more liberal-arts geared school. But I'd also like to be near museums for practical reasons (internships, connections, research, etc). And I also want study-abroad opportunities.</p>
<p>Which colleges are best for my needs? I know Yale and Columbia are widely known as having great art history programs, but I'd like to know about some other schools.</p>
<p>One more thing: Would going to a school near a museum give me an advantage for internships/job positions? Or would I have an equal chance of interning somewhere like the Met if I attended, let's say, Dartmouth rather than Columbia?</p>
<p>Many schools have January terms which would provide a time other than summer to do an internship, so you might want to look for those. Speaking of Dartmouth, they have the D-plan which allows you to take 2 semesters off in a row at some point (because you have to attend one summer) and that would be a good internship time. If you want a liberal arts school and have the stats, Williams is supposed to be excellent for art history. I could be wrong but I suspect that the quality of the department and the professors’ connections may be more important than geographic proximity to the museums although you certainly can’t go wrong with Columbia.</p>
<p>I’ve heard of the D-plan, and it sounds very appealing. My only concern with Dartmouth is regarding the quality of its art history department. USNWR rankings placed it in the top 10 for the major, so I’m guessing it is pretty good. I just want to know if anyone happens to know more specific information about certain schools’ art history departments and their benefits/drawbacks.</p>
<p>Thanks for your reply, I really appreciate it. Yes, Williams is always a possibility. :)</p>
<p>sundaymorning - I have potential interest along these lines as well. I didn’t know that USNWR had rankings for majors. Would you please share the list you have? </p>
<p>I have heard second hand that Bryn Mawr and Wellesley had strong departments if you are female.</p>
<p>Maybe San Francisco State University (a CSU) since it’s in San Fran and close to a lot of museums. However, I wouldn’t recommend an Art History major for anyone simply because there probably aren’t too many jobs available (except museums and teaching). But I don’t know you or your personality so I shouldn’t tell you not to do something. If it interests you, you can find a college that has a Ph.D program in it, and don’t mind going to school for 6+ years getting a job that won’t pay a whole lot, then it will be okay. Maybe I’m just thinking about the money too much and getting rich. Maybe it’s more having a fun job and making enough. idk.</p>
<p>Sunday, There are good art history departments at many universities and liberal arts colleges. I would single out Yale, Brown, Harvard and Williams among the top feeders to curator and director positions. All offer museum access, study abroad and excellent academics.</p>
<p>Some others to consider would be Wesleyan, Vassar, Skidmore, Oberlin. Smith and Bryn Mawr if you’re female. In New York I would lean more toward NYU than Columbia. Also Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Melon. Dartmouth? I don’t know. . . If you like the ambience of Dartmouth you’d probably like Williams too.</p>
<p>I’m most familiar with the program at Williams so I’ll give you some background there. Williams has one of the most respected art history departments in the country, offering both a B.A. and an M.A. So many Williams grads have gone on to high profile museum positions that they’re known as the Williams mafia. There are three excellent museums on or near campus and lots of opportunities for hands-on museum experience. Connections for summer internships and post graduate jobs are very strong as are placements in prestigious graduate programs. </p>
<p>Summer internships at the big name New York museums are extremely competitive and difficult to secure; however there are lots of other options to gain museum experience while in college. Williams sponsors a summer internship program with the Gardiner museum in Boston (through the Steamboat Foundation) which is especially appealing.</p>
<p>I believe New York is the center of all Art activities. You should check out the auction houses and the dealers as well, in addition to the Museums. I used to work for an art dealer so I am familiar with all the tradings in art. There is only so many museums around it will be hard to get in as a curator, but in the art dealers arena, there are more opportunities.</p>
<p>However, please keep in mind that work in the Art world is hard to find and probably will not payback the 250K you spend in the ivies any sooner, unless you become a dealer yourself. I know that because I worked part time in the field for a long time. On the bright side, many Art History Majors ended up on Wall Street, go figure.</p>
<p>If your stats are good enough for Williams, try Columbia.</p>
<p>Besides programs like Williams, I would suggest focus on programs in/near large cities that haver great museums. With the exception of LA, most of these will be the older Eastern and Midwestern cities. In addition to schools already mentioned, some others to consider are U Chicago, UCLA, Princeton, Penn, and Johns Hopkins. I don’t hear too much about Case Western Reserve, but it might be worth a look, as it’s right across the street from the fabulous Cleveland Art Museum.</p>
NYU shortchanges its undergrads; the IFA is where the action is, and that has virtually nothing to do with undergrads. At least at Columbia most of the same faculty are teaching undergrads and grad students. </p>
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Well, it would certainly help if you have some idea of your area of focus.</p>
<p>Dartmouth and Williams have perfectly good art history programs, for example, but it would be pointless to choose them if your interest is Egyptian or Near Eastern art, particularly because they don’t offer the proper languages. No program offers every specialty, and if you plan to study a specialized area (e.g. South Asian art or Pre-Columbian art), you would do well to choose colleges with particular strength in that area. Even the not-as-good PhD programs in art history are obscenely selective these days, and the MA programs are heading that way…having courses in your area can only help your application.</p>
<p>I second zapfino’s suggestion of Penn. In addition to excellent art history and archaeology programs, it has demonstrated more devotion to ethical collecting behavior than many of its fellow institutions (e.g. the Pennsylvania Declaration).</p>
<p>chica2college-- If you go to the USNWR website rankings, on the left there is an option to type in certain majors. However, I’m not sure if these rankings are the most reliable source.</p>
<p>I know that internships at big name city museums are very competitive. Is it necessary to have connections in the art/museum world in order to obtain these internships? Or is it still possible to get these positions by working hard, having a killer GPA, and showing an intense passion for art?</p>
<p>in that there is only one internship job available from Butterfields, an auction house I am familiar with. There is no museum internship listed. Of course it is only one site, but I don’t think getting an intern/job in the art world will be the same as getting a job in IBM or Google, in which, if you have a good grade, they will recruite you. </p>
<p>I got that part time “job” by be friends with this dealer. We were peers in another dicipline. The art world is very small, unlike Google, they hire 500 software engineers at a time, year in and out. The museums may have one turn over per year or even that.</p>
<p>The museums do not publicize their selection criteria for summer internships so this is just hearsay and speculation, but my understanding is that the places go to 1) qualified students with academic connections 2) friends and relatives of trustees and donors 3) under represented minorities.</p>
<p>Lots of folks have already mentioned Williams, but if you are confident in your goal that you want to be an art museum curator, Williams is, without any doubt, your best bet for that purpose. That doesn’t necessarily mean it should be your first choice – you have to like other aspects of the school, because career interests change and shouldn’t be your sole consideration in choosing college any event. But particularly in light of Williams’ small size, no schools can even come close to comparing to Williams’ network of museum curators. And Williams alumni tend to be very loyal / attentive to undergrads who contact them for career advice, so you’d instantly have at least a foot in the door at the best network of museum curators in the country:</p>
<p>Williams’ other advantage is close proximity to two enormous (and aggressively expanding, which is also key) world-class museums (MassMoca and Clark), as well as a top-notch campus museum (WCMA). Several highly-regarded smaller museums, like the Normal Rockwell museum, are located within 30-40 minutes of campus. There are NO rural places in the country with that sort of concentration of big-time museums. And the good news is, it’s MUCH less competitive to be a Williams student trying to work at the Clark or WCMA at MassMoca than it is to be one of tens of thousands of New York area students (competing with grad students, no less) aiming to work at the much larger group of similarly-regarded NYC museums. </p>
<p>And of course, Williams has the very small grad program in art history, so if you are aggressive in the classes you take / activities you partake, you can possibly meet / network with folks who will likely be well-established curators by the time you finish your graduate studies.</p>
<p>Among liberal arts schools Wellesley is also very strong in this area, but I’m not sure if you, errr, qualify :).</p>
Another local institution of particular interest to art history students: the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, a nationally known facility for evaluation and restoration of historic artworks. They offer undergraduate-level [url=<a href=“http://www.williamstownart.org/education/overview.html]education[/url”>http://www.williamstownart.org/education/overview.html]education[/url</a>] programs in art conservation, but given their location, it’s probably difficult for anyone other than Williams students to take advantage.</p>
<p>Oberlin not only has a fantastic museum on-campus, it is a half-hour from the Cleveland Museum of Art. It seemed like most of the art history majors I knew interned at major museums in New York. At least three at the Met, several at the Whitney, Guggenheim, and I believe one had a 2-year fellowship at the MoMA after graduating. At Oberlin, undergrads have actually curated shows at the museum, largely unheard of elsewhere. What a previous poster said about all departments having strengths is absolutely true–you won’t find faculty in all fields (not by a long shot), but each is versant beyond their immediate specialization and will, more importantly than giving you grounding in a particular field, endow you with powerful ways of thinking that I guarantee will set you up nicely for graduate school, if you so choose. (This is attested to the fact that Oberlin sends more students to humanities PhD programs than any other LAC).
Cheers.</p>