I have an MA in Public History from Loyola University of Chicago. I will have a 
new hire from Loyola join our team this summer after he graduates with his MA in 
Public History.

One of the conversations that I had with our new hire was about working in 
archives. When I made him his records management job offer after his internship 
with us, I challenged him to find an archival job paying what we offered to an 
entry level (and this is someone with a fair amount of experience in archives 
from various jobs and internships). There were none. Heck there weren't 
experienced jobs in archives paying the same salary. We also talked a bit about 
the challenges of getting an archives job with an MA in Public History. If you 
look at most archives jobs out there, they tend to be under a librarian and the 
requirement (not preference) is for an "ALA accredited MLS". That means no 
Public Historians need apply in most cases. Now some non-profits and 
corporations may be more open minded, but my experience has been that librarians 
trust the MLS regardless of the job. Archives jobs also tend to pay on the 
poverty-level side more often than not.

So a word of advice to your CEO's daughter would be to examine carefully the 
jobs that come available in archives and to not be surprised when she is 
rejected out of hand. She also needs internships in archives and most certainly 
needs to get her CA as soon as possible after graduation. When she applies for 
archives jobs, she needs to really focus on archival language in her resume and 
put up her experience first, before her education, so the resume-bots pick up of 
the archival skills before auto-rejecting because of lack of proper degree.

She may really need to come over to the dark side and join us records managers. 
We're not elitists, the pay is often better, and we have chocolate (ok, we do in 
my office). Feel free to point her to me as a fellow public historian who has 
evolved his role over time. As much as I enjoyed doing research in archives and 
making cool discoveries, I would have lost my mind talking to genealogists and 
processing collections had I stayed in that field. One of the fun things about 
records management as a recovering archivist is that you still get to discovery 
stuff of historical import and preserve it. It is a great asset to have that 
perspective and make appraisal decisions in the field. That's why I tend to like 
people with archival training because they can better identify critical 
historical records.

 Patrick Cunningham, CRM, FAI
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"Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier." 
-- Colin Powell

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