MSMC Certificate at UMD offers a 4 course/12-credit hour certificate that augments graduate work in American Studies, Anthropology and Archaeology, Historic Preservation, History, Library and Information Studies, and other degree programs by educating future professionals, scholars, and activists to critically assess museums as political, cultural, and social institutions in order to create twenty-first-century museums. The MSMC Certificate provides students with the theoretical grounding paired with practical skillsets that can enhance their job opportunities and equip them to work and research in museums and similar institutions. Students in many partnering graduate programs across campus can complete the certificate without taking any additional credit hours.

Mission Statement

The MSMC Graduate Certificate Program educates future professionals, scholars, and researchers interested in working with or doing research in museums through engaging with scholarship and practices across museum spaces. The MSMC program’s coursework and pedagogy provide students with intellectual tools and model practices to help museums change for the better once graduates enter their chosen professions.

Interdisciplinarity 

By drawing upon faculty and professional expertise from so many different academic disciplines and professional fields, MSMC is uniquely positioned to prepare students for a huge range of careers within galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs). Our students hail from many degree programs in different colleges, contributing to a rich diversity of conversations around the seminar table in our courses.

Dual Focus on Research and Practice

The MSMC program is designed to support student interests in research and/or in practice related to museums and material or visual culture. A sampling of recent student projects demonstrates the range of work our students undertake:

• Crafting a teaching curriculum for several collections in an art museum;
• Identifying the people and events recorded in silent films with limited documentation and uncovering the historical stories around these films;
• Conducting oral history interviews with community residents to collaborate with them in creating the first digital documentation of their history and heritage and preserving an archive of their experiences;
• Researching and writing catalog entries to understand the contexts for artifacts collected from immigrant families at a major history museum;
• Consulting a university’s historical collections to trace the origin and history of a racist mascot that the university formerly used;
• Documenting the role and discovering the names of enslaved laborers in building and maintaining a historical home in a state capital city;
• Using research and theory to document historical inaccuracies and bias in a major science museum’s exhibition and providing a plan for rectifying those issues using materials already in the museum’s collection;
• Writing a white paper to provide guidance for collecting and interpreting the archives and artifacts of undocumented immigrants in the DMV.

These represent just a small part of the range of types of projects conducted by MSMC students, but they clearly demonstrate the impact of the work done by our students.

Networking and Field Experiences

MSMC students take a required Practicum Project course as a capstone experience for the certificate program. Each student arranges a field experience with a host institution on or off campus and develops a discrete project with input from a supervisor at the host institution and an MSMC faculty advisor. The practicum enables students to seek experiential learning opportunities from the rich range of large and small museums and cultural research or heritage organizations in the region or beyond; MSMC maintains a database of opportunities to support students in finding a good placement. In addition, MSMC course instructors either plan field trips to area museums or archives or invite museum professionals to visit their courses to provide professional expertise and networking experiences for students.

Student Success

As of May 2022, 63% of our graduates were successful in getting a job, internship, or fellowship in a museum, library, or other cultural institution immediately upon graduation from the certificate program. Another substantial percentage continue their education in M.A. or Ph.D. degree programs after completion of our 12-credit certificate. Alumni have worked at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Glenstone, and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African American History and Culture in Baltimore, MD, among many, many other exciting placements.