Penultimate

I spent the first hour of this morning doing more research on trade background, more so on there anthropology of it and it's patterns and less about specific items like lapis lazuli that I did yesterday. At 10 I met with Mr. Griffith and Adam to go over my independent study, just to make sure that both sides of my supervision connected and could communicate. After discussing my performance, we spoke a little bit about Winterim as a program, what could be improved, and how to make a lasting relationship between TMA and MV through Winterim and beyond. I think that my experience at TMA has been very valuable and might be counted as a successful Independent Study due to my fulfillment of a tangible project with  applicable goals that have assisted in a broader sense in my education, along with giving my the opportunity to explore a field I am theoretically interested in working in in the future. Overall, I think I managed to have the luck to find a situation that I could make into an experience that fit my needs with a level of involvement and experience suited to my situation and interest.

Now, this also leads into the fact that I could potentially continue work on Global|Local outside of Winterim, as a rather non-intensive internship with TMA throughout next semester. Now, I hope that I will be able to balance that out and work with it, and I am very excited by the prospect, but it also leads into another aspect of Winterim in that, however amazing the experience is, and I do think it is fantastic, it is by nature very insular and almost always limited to a 3 week experience. Though a wonderful life event perhaps, three weeks, at least in the Independent Study I have done, does not give a huge range of time for improvement. Yes, I have done so in the scope of things, but not nearly as much as I potentially could due to temporal limitations. So, more food for thought I suppose. 

After that meeting, I went to Visitor Engagement. Adam is the current head, but more as an interim who will step down once a permanent head may be found. As a result, today's meeting was focused on outlining what the group wants and does not want in a new head, particularly in regards to Adam's own performance, though there was not nearly as much direct commentary as he seemed to invite. It seems this lack of criticism might be a Midwestern thing, but I have not tested this hypothesis, just an observation. Anyways, it was interesting to hear what people wanted in a leader, and although pretty standard, there were some ideas, such as experience in museums, that sparked a slight interest because of how those present held the museum to be a different entity. I suppose to a certain extent this is true of any group, and can be seen even at MV. 

I spent the rest of the day researching trade, finally blocking out much of the stock jargon that had cluttered up my search yesterday through focusing on the anthropological study of trade. This yielded some interesting results, but if haven't done it in a clean version yet and only have my rather haphazard notes, so I'll have to make all of that pretty tomorrow.