From Small-Town Archives to Collection Manager: Lizzy Carr's Museum Studies Path

Lizzy Carr's museum career started before she was old enough to drive. Her mother worked at their town's local historical society, so Carr spent weekends and summers surrounded by exhibitions and old things. By age 10, staff were letting her help mount exhibits.

"I was always kind of one of those kids that's really just a mini-adult," Carr said. "I loved organizing old things and history."

She set the interest aside when her mother changed jobs, then rediscovered it in high school while weighing college options. Her mom made the connection: Carr loved history and loved organizing, so why not become an archivist? Carr started interning at her town's governmental archives, working with birth certificates, death records and deeds, and arrived at RIT already knowing what she wanted.

She found RIT specifically because of its Museum Studies program. She later added a second major in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences (now Humanities, Computing, and Design), drawn to the question of how museums can use digital tools for real visitor engagement.

At RIT, she worked in the RIT Archives, joined the Honors Program, and served on the Honors Council. She credits the museum studies faculty broadly and Professor Juilee Decker specifically, who mentored her undergraduate thesis and has stayed a resource for career and graduate school advice in the years since.

The bigger change was not something that a transcript can show: life and career experience.  Carr came out of an International Baccalaureate diploma program locked in on grades and career outcomes, and left with something different.

"Some people go to college specifically to learn about themselves and grow as a person and become an adult. I kind of went where I was like, ‘I'm getting this degree, all I care about is the grades, the diploma I get at the end, and everything else is tangential’," she said. "By the end, I was more happy about the life experience I gained."

She points to the theory courses, paired with the hands-on work, as what pushed her thinking wider.

"I can catalog an object for you, because I learned how to do that in class, but I can also think about what it means to catalog an object, and the implications of cataloging it certain ways, and leaving out other information," Carr said.

Today Carr is the Collection Manager & Archivist at the George Eastman Museum.  There, she is responsible for physical and intellectual control of a museum collection: knowing where objects are, whether they are labeled correctly, stored properly and handled the right way, and keeping database records current on where objects came from and why they matter. She is also finishing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Rochester, with a target of completing within the next year.

Between roles, she built a digital archive for a nonprofit on contract, a project that became a lesson in the transferable thinking she now recommends to students.

"I had to figure out how I could structure it in a way where people who weren't me, and didn't have this archival training, could pick it up and continue it," she said.

Her advice to prospective liberal arts students is to take the long view.

"What you're really learning are life skills or ways of thinking that can be broadly applicable to a lot of different things," Carr said. "The dream job you had at 17, 18 when you entered college may not be the dream job you have when you leave at 21, 22."