Walker Brown

When I was a child I decided that I was going to be a scientist because I liked science and until college I assumed that that was what I was going to do. The actual discipline that I thought I was going into changed starting as astronomy and winding up with zoology. Unfortunately I was not ready for college I assumed going into undergrad that I would be able to coast by like I did in high school and predictably did very poorly during my first two years. After that I was in a strange place where I didn't really have any plan for myself I grabbed a Philosophy and Religious Studies degree because I was interested in them but I didn't have any idea what I would even be able to do when I graduated. 

When I did graduate I got a job as a Kennel Technician at a doggie daycare and fell into a pit where I just didn't see a future for myself. Eventually a family trip made me realize that I enjoyed going to museums because I liked learning about the artifacts on display and I decided to focus on archives because I wanted to interact with history. As I said before my main educational and professional goal is learning about history and items in collections what I ultimately want out of the profession is to interact with and have to learn about items. The major breaking point for me when working as a Kennel Technician was the feeling of doing nothing I was spending 8 hours a day standing around looking at dogs and all I had to show for it was a paycheck. 

I want to be doing something that has some tangible results from my work even if that is something as minor as a catalog entry or a preserved item, it is still something that I have done and wouldn't have been done without me. The other thing is work that I actually need to engage with, figuring out the qualities of an item, who the author of the item is, how do we organize the collection.

My main interests lie with history and artifacts so I wish to focus on those in my work. I'm really drawn to these because it satisfies my desire to go down rabbit holes and focus on the minute details of my work. While I originally figured that my interests were solely with very old history, following my practicum at the Plano Interurban Railway Museum I realized that I do like recent history just the more mundane and human aspects, such as local railways and their employees, rather than the big, charismatic aspects normally focused on. Artifacts feed into my desire to actually engage with the work that I am doing. Artifacts being physical items mean that I have to focus on them and manipulate them for my work.