Beloit’s Career Channels and Stateline Small Museums Conference (SSMC) hosted a meet-and-greet in the Powerhouse's Riverside Lounge.
Credit: Ellie Anderbyrne

On Friday, April 21, in the Logan Museum from 1-4 p.m., SSMC will host a workshop for Beloit College students, staff, and faculty followed by a networking dinner event with Beloit alumni working in museums. Attendees will learn how to make photo corners for mounting and hinges with methyl cellulose, and how to hinge works on paper with methyl cellulose, important skills in the museums field. But more prominently, the conference will introduce students to alumni working in small museums and archives.

Michael Dango, the coordinator for the Worldbuilding Career Channel, says that the conference is “centered around Beloit alums who are in this field and making opportunities for those alums to connect with current students who are curious about how to enter these fields, how to network within these fields.”

The Logan Museum is the site of this year's SSMC conference.

The conference continues the following day in the Powerhouse’s Weissberg Auditorium, where six Beloit alumni will give presentations on everything from the creation of new museums to budget-friendly strategies for exhibit development. The six presenters are:

• Sara Hindmarch’98, Collections Manager, Obama Presidential Center Museum;
• Sara Podejko’09, Registrar and Collections Move Project Manager, Milwaukee Public Museum;
• Kate Bennett’18, Museum Curator, Pleasant Prairie Historical Society;
• Tom Skwerski’87, Exhibits Operations Director, Chicago Field Museum;
• Catie Anderson’10, Curator of Education, Woodson Art Museum; and
• Andi Altenbach’18, Archivist and Librarian, Studio Gang.

Career Channels combines students’ diverse interests with programming, alumni connections, and events like this conference to help them think about their future careers. Dango says that Channels events give students a chance to “come out of Beloit being able to tell a story about how their classroom experiences and their out of classroom experiences really worked together to prepare them for whatever kind of career they end up pursuing.”

SSMC is a volunteer association that hosts annual conferences in Wisconsin and Illinois to support small museums, volunteers, professional staff, and others interested in the field.