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052 - SHA2017 - Lisa Dretske and Life After Grad School
73 Plays7 years ago
Guest host Lauren Alston Bridges interviews her friend and former college roommate about their careers and lives after graduate school. Enjoy this candid look at the profession.
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Transcript
Reconnection at the Conference
00:00:17
Speaker
Alright, this is Lauren Austin Bridges, PhD student at William & Mary, and I've run into my old roommate, Lisa Dretsky, and fellow master's student at Illinois State University, where we
00:00:24
Speaker
you are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:33
Speaker
went from about 2008-ish to 2010-ish. Or more. But we've just been catching up this conference and kind of talking about our life experiences and how our lives have diverged or kind of come back around full circle since.
00:00:53
Speaker
since graduate school.
Lauren's Return to Academia
00:00:54
Speaker
So I've, as you just heard, ended back up in a PhD program, which after Illinois State, I said I would never go back ever again. And I did. And it's been a great, interesting journey. So I was just going to ask Lisa a couple of questions about what she's done after Illinois State and kind of how she ended up there in the first place. So Lisa.
00:01:19
Speaker
Thanks for talking with me. Yeah, no problem. So what actually brought you to Illinois State because you're from Wisconsin?
Lisa's Grad School Decision
00:01:27
Speaker
Yes, I went to undergrad at University of Evansville in Indiana and my advisor encouraged me to apply to six different schools for grad school and I kind of did my focus more on
00:01:42
Speaker
historical archaeology, once I had more folks on that. And then maybe some museum studies programs, too, I looked at. I got into two grad schools. One was one of my top choices, University of Denver. Oh, I never knew that. This is new information coming out. I was super stoked and I got accepted bouncing off the walls until I got the notice of how much it would cost.
00:02:11
Speaker
Yes.
Mentorship and Grad School Choices
00:02:12
Speaker
It would have cost me probably over $200,000 by the time I was done with just two years of grad school. Oh my gosh. And I knew as a archaeologist, you're not making that back. Right, yeah, you're smart about this. Okay, yeah, cost-effectiveness of getting master's degree and not being indebted for the rest of your life with unrealistic expectations of how much you're going to make in finding your pirate treasure.
00:02:37
Speaker
And actually, I got accepted to Illinois State and I was still kind of disappointed. I mean, not disappointed, it wasn't my top choice. And actually, I talked to the person who was the field director for a dig I was helping out at in St. Charles, Missouri.
00:02:56
Speaker
and he actually was at William & Mary's and was doing that dig and he gave me the advice don't put as much money into your master's program if it's just the name that you're trying to get you want to get the experience as well and go with the place that might give you the most experience
00:03:16
Speaker
and not put you into debt. So Illinois State did offer a lot of really great
Graduate School Reflections
00:03:21
Speaker
experiences. They offered a graduate assistantship program, which would be great to put on my resume, which University of Denver wasn't going to give me anything like that. So it was kind of a bit easier decision once I talked to him.
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I remember we were working our graduate assistantships together and we'd all take our little coffee rakes and then go back to inventory photography, Carl reorganizing what we had organized on the table. But it was a neat experience and then having our classes comped for that really helped with the expenses.
00:03:57
Speaker
Yes, of graduate school. Yeah, so some of the professors, I ended up working with Katie Sampeck at the SHA. This year we just had a great session for the great Dr. Elizabeth Scott and she was your advisor. She was. She was an amazing advisor.
00:04:17
Speaker
very stern but empathetic at the same time and she just was there for any you know anything that I needed support with whether she was interested in my life and my career all together wrapped up so that was she was a great advisor. Yeah I mean to get through graduate school you kind of have to take care of your personal life as well a little bit you know your your mental health I think our cohort was
00:04:43
Speaker
really
Diverging Research Paths
00:04:44
Speaker
essential for getting through some of the tougher lofty theoretical classes and then getting through field schools and going on the journey of writing and just a lot of funny late night study sessions at local coffee houses made it a lot more of a pleasant experience.
00:05:08
Speaker
I'm not sure I kind of got through it if I didn't have you guys to, I don't know, pretty much cry and laugh about it. Simultaneously. Pretty much, yeah. But we ended up studying kind of divergent topics. I went to Central America and then you ended up studying some German materials.
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, it was kind of a... I knew I was going to go into the more German side of the site at St. Genevieve. Yeah, because you're from good, hearty German stock, right? Yeah, I grew up learning German and speaking it with my family and then in undergrad. My undergrad thesis was focused on German archaeology.
00:05:47
Speaker
So I kind of went in knowing that I was going to do something with that.
Revisiting the Ziegler Site
00:05:53
Speaker
What did your project end up as, I guess? And then you just revisited it, this conference. So how is that experience going through that initial project, putting it together, and then this revisit years later?
00:06:07
Speaker
It was interesting. It brought back memories of the mad dash to actually finish the grand master's thesis. And then I very much kind of hid it in a corner for a solid year or two without looking at it or really even thinking about it, I think.
00:06:28
Speaker
It kind of brought back a lot of emotions and memories and it also allowed me to kind of look at it from a different perspective because I'm coming at it more of a museum perspective now.
00:06:46
Speaker
because I've learned so much with interpretation and museum studies, and I'm able to look at this and kind of ask some different questions about myself and about
19th-Century Identity through Consumption
00:06:56
Speaker
the world. So you were looking at the Ziegler family? Yeah. Okay, Ziegler site. So just give like a little bit of background, you know, like a little synopsis on what is the Ziegler site, but yeah, to give people an experience of what you can get out of a master's.
00:07:12
Speaker
Jeanine Ziegler, Green Tree Tavern site is the full name. It's kind of long and it has gone from different hands. It started as a French home. They built it when they moved into St. Genevieve, a French family did. And when Jeanine family decided to sell the house, they sold it to a German family. And then the German family used it as their wholesale tobacco business in their home.
00:07:39
Speaker
So that's kind of the trade of hands. The German family owned it during the 19th century up until the early 20th century. And I kind of looked at it from analyzing everything I could from newspapers in the area to archaeological record, pro-rate inventory, basically anything I could get my hands on. I wanted to see all the different perspectives and what those could tell me about it. I just realized it's snowing outside.
00:08:06
Speaker
They followed me from Wisconsin, I'm sorry. Lisa, what did you do? You brought the snow down. Let's start singing Frost and Snow. I know. Let it go. Oh man, this is wild. Okay, so we went to Texas to experience a snowstorm. You can tell your family it's snowing here. I know.
00:08:30
Speaker
Okay, back to the Ziegler's. Yeah, but talking about identity and what that means in a very material way. And especially in the 19th century, I know Katie Stampet got myself really interested in ideas of consumption and what that means and the choices people were making. And so the talk was, you know, how is this family who's living in a French house expressing their
00:09:00
Speaker
maybe German identity within the sort of French community. So how did you see the ways that maybe more of that personality of a family? Yeah, it was definitely a realization that I can't be looking at just ethnic markers or identity markers. That's not the way I wanted to go about this because it just seems too
00:09:23
Speaker
black
Lisa's Career Journey
00:09:24
Speaker
and white, and when you're dealing with that discrete identity, it's not black and white at all. Everybody's individually different and flowing and moving, so I kind of tried to focus more on how the people were using what was around them.
00:09:40
Speaker
Obviously, they're in the time and age where things were actually getting mass-produced or getting produced elsewhere and they had the choices. So I tried to focus more on, okay, what are they doing with these choices? What are they doing as individuals and showing their ethnicity in that way and not necessarily like...
00:10:00
Speaker
I'm going to make this thing because that's what German ethnic people do. And I try to stay away from that. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so after ISU, we went our separate ways. I went on a trip west. And so just say a little bit about what jobs you've done and those experiences that filled in the gaps between ISU 2010, 2017, Shaw.
00:10:24
Speaker
A lot. I worked retail for a while. I kind of got my head wall. I'm going to use North Face items on the field when I started with a side job at working at the North Face store. Then I ended up becoming a manager for the North Face store. I worked in downtown Chicago for a while. Then I moved up to Milwaukee. Then when I finally finished my master's thesis,
00:10:49
Speaker
After a year out, I finally was like, I can't work retail, I gotta do something with museums. And I quit my retail job, and I got an internship, an unpaid internship at the Shedd Aquarium, which was worth it, and probably one of the best working environments I've ever worked in. They're great down there, they wanted you to grow, they wanted you to learn, not just me as an intern, but everybody that works at the Shedd Aquarium.
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah, and you said you looked at that because it was a really cool name. Yeah. And you were like, this would look super cool on a resume. Yes, it would. I love that one. It's kind of a little, little of that, yeah. But it gave me much more than just a major resume. It gave me a lot of experience in development, evaluation.
00:11:39
Speaker
And then after the shut aquarium, I also worked a short little bit at a children's museum. Very short, a little bit. And then I ended up working at the Kenosha Public Museum and planned to give these major gifts. They are also a very great place to work. They want to make sure that the museums grow in Kenosha and basically all of southeastern Wisconsin.
00:12:04
Speaker
It was great. And now I just took a new position two weeks ago as the executive director of the Comfort Center, which is a historical cultural site in Kenosha, Wisconsin. OK, so what would you say buying the bullet, going to graduate school, getting into a little bit of debt? What was one of those skills that, in all our couple years there, really helped you on this journey to this directorship? I guess it's that I could manage a lot more in my life
00:12:34
Speaker
You know, I think a lot of people think that you can be surprised how many different things you can do. You can volunteer, you can have a full-time job, you can have multiple part-time jobs, you can manage it if you know it's going to accumulate to something.
00:12:52
Speaker
The perspective I have
Skills from Grad School
00:12:53
Speaker
to take when going into my new job too, because there's so many different aspects to it. Because it is a small non-profit, I'm going to have to put my hands on many different projects at all times. But going into it with that perspective that I can manage it, it will accumulate into something, just take it day by day. The critical
Returning to SHAs Conference
00:13:13
Speaker
thinking, like how do I get from this point to this point? I'm flat for the project models, and this is the law in my office.
00:13:21
Speaker
Yeah, so how's it being back at the SHAs? Well, it's a little different. Coming at it as, you know, like, I was like the excited undergrad that wanted to, I saw these big names and I'm like, oh, I have to see this person. Now it's kind of going back and patching up with people that I haven't seen in a long time. I don't know.
00:13:44
Speaker
I think it's a little bit more bellow, but enjoyable. Not as just like, I must impress this person to get into graduate school. Yeah, not as much, but I still want to impress people. There's still some names where I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this person's here. I get to listen to them talk. It's
Closing Thoughts and Self-Care
00:14:02
Speaker
a little different.
00:14:03
Speaker
catching up we haven't caught up in a while we're finding you know these connections with different talks and kind of these interests that we've continued to share over the years and so that's been that's been neat thanks for talking to me and thanks for letting me force you to talk to me for this conference yes everyone has a cold here
00:14:27
Speaker
Everybody take care of yourselves, get sleep, drink lots of water, don't stay out too late networking. Yeah, you need to listen. Alright, well, that's all I have for now.
00:14:43
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com