Art history students visit D.C. Area museums

People come from all over the world to D.C. to see all the museums. And the program's amazing it's been a great opportunity for me just to like learn and explore more about like art and history. Today we brought our students, Dr. Jewitt and I brought our classes together. My class is the explore campus collections course. This field research trip is really meant as a signature experience for students in the visual arts, a society minor, and art history majors. They pick a work of art of their choice. We're lucky to have a world-class museum in the National Capital region to use. And then they research that work, drawing out a multiplicity of interpretations over the course of the semester. One thing, to project an image digitally 2D in a dark classroom. It's another to be enveloped by that object in person. And this is how field research is done sort of in the discipline, in the field, by professionals, by academics, and we're giving students the same experience. So that's when I just kind of started looking around for different opportunities. We brought our students to talk to alumni who have graduated from both our BA and our MA programs and are now currently employed at the National Gallery and in other places like the Smithsonian. I think we're really, you know, hitting two important points with both of these because our alumni are really a touchstone for us. They give the students an idea of some of the different paths they might take and how that works in the real world. They can see the trajectory for folks who are in the exact same position that they were just a few years ago. It was a great experience to get to see the art that they have here and everything that D.C. has to offer as well as the chance that we get to talk with alums from the program and other like professionals in the museum field. Just getting that like one-on-one conversation time is great. Being with my friends and learning and being with these professors they're so they're so great to learn from and I have enjoyed it so much I'm really just soaking up every moment of being here.