What does a curator do?

After I completed my studies in Athens I was almost sure that the educators career wasn't for me. I was looking for almost a year what else I could do and that would be interesting for me. My first thought was that I love history so I started to think about where I could find history and work with it. In books was my first answer. But that wasn't the right one. The correct was museums where you can read, imagine and create stories. Stories of people who lived many years back, of objects that traveled across the world and remained alive throughout the centuries. Yes that was what I wanted to do. Help other people learn history, visit museums, create their own thoughts and ideas.

Coming from a country with great history and many museums but not many curators and experience in this field I found it difficult to discover how I could work in a museum. From where I should start, did i need extra qualification or how I could find a job. For example did I need a degree, some seminars or I could just start applying for jobs. Moreover, what a curator does was a major factor for me to understand. And I can say that it took me almost a year to find out. After a long researching year and a webinar, in education in museums, I came to UK to start my MA in Museums and Heritage ,as I wanted to be fully educated and ready to start my curatorial career. But the question was still following me and that time it wasn't coming from me. It was appearing every time that I was revealing to my family and friends about my new aspiration. What is a curator? What does a curator do? What are you going to do with that degree? Do you want to be something like a tour guide? And many more similar questions.

Even I wasn't sure about the answer. I wanted to say to them "come on guys I don't know exactly and that's the reason why I'll go to find out". That was for me the Master. I wanted to learn more about the museums and the jobs related to them. I was sure that I wanted to work in one but I wasn't about the role I wanted to have. And that was the next stage of my adventurous trip.

When I moved to UK, I realised that here people had a general understanding of what a curator or a museologist does. Across the UK you can find numerous heritage sites and museums to visit and work. And that type of job wasn't that strange and out of ordinary for people here. During my studies I began to understand all the different roles that someone can have in a museum. Throughout that period, I started to imagine what I wanted to do in the museums. I had an undergraduate degree in learning and probably in a few months another one in museology. It was the frightening time to start looking for jobs where I could combine these two sectors and land an amazing role in a institution.

Still, every time that I was going back to Greece I had to answer the same tiring, after some point, questions. But now I was more prepared for them. I had gained understanding in museums, I had seen and talked with people who have already worked in them and I almost knew what I wanted to do. Thus, I was prepared to come up against them.

A curator is the one who takes the history, the objects, the paintings and transforms them into stories. Stories which speak to diverse people, that can make people think, create the future themselves and expand their experiences. A curator should be objective, let others read the story and create their own meanings. Is not there to teach them history or to tell them what they should remember after their visit. A curator has to be aware of many different parameters such as, the aims of the museum, who are the visitors, how an exhibition can be interactive and engaging and what she can do in order to attract visitors' interest. While answering all of these questions she has to keep in mind that she is surronded by simple or extraordinary objects and she has to present each one with the most engaging and accessible way regardless their importance.

The exact same thing was happening every time. I was starting explaining to my friends and I was forgetting to stop. My audience was bored after the first minutes but they couldn't say anything. They had asked many times before and now I had the answers and they had to listen. And it wasn't my fault that the answer was taking so long. Because a curator is so many things and you cannot just explain what he does in a few sentences. You need a lot of time to realize and understand and after that explain to someone that a curator creates a form of art, and he can't have just a simple answer for that.

Now how a curator finds a job in a museum is another long story.....