Artlover4

Kadin, see if you can find conservation labs at museums or private practice businesses in your area who might be willing to let you visit. You can look up the ones in your area using the "Find a Conservator" tool on the AIC (our national organization) website. Just send some cold emails. You won't get a 100% response rate but if they are willing to let you visit, you can get a better sense of what their work is like. Sometimes people will even offer you a work opportunity during your visit. Many early experiences in the field are unpaid (volunteer or intern) but it will be very beneficial for you to see if you are good at it and want to keep going. If you do decide to look into conservation grad school, you'll also need to take courses in chemistry, art history or studio art, to fill whatever gaps you have in the pre-reqs required for each school. At a minimum, you'll need 2 semesters each of inorganic and organic chem (with good grades) plus a certain number of art history and studio art courses. Look on program websites for specifics. It will take you awhile but is common for people to spend a few years doing night/weekend classes to get the requirements they didn't take in undergrad.

I am a graduate student in your field, and agree with the response by fuzzylogician. If you decided not to report this person, you likely did the right thing. Frankly, this is such a competitive field with an enormous amount of over saturation that you really do need to show off some unique and valuable skill-set in order to get into the US graduate schools. With that in mind, the committee member did you a favor by suggesting you broaden your horizons, because that is what you would need to be a competitive candidate on your next round of applications. The reality is that the committee member's behavior would not be considered at all inappropriate by the majority of those currently in this field, in the US. While it stings to receive feedback like that (especially when you interpret it as dismissive), you should know that reporting this committee member will result in zero admonishments for them, as the program almost definitely backs up what they are saying. With how competitive this field is (you know it just gets more competitive after grad school, right?) you will need to get used to both rejection and pitching yourself/ your skills to different people, so take this as an opportunity to think about how you want to promote yourself. For example, you are proud of your work on non-fine art objects, right? So make sure to talk about how and why those objects & experiences are important, not just to you but also in the broader sense (important to cultural stakeholders, etc). Keep going, pursuing the work you are the most passionate about, and remember that that there really are multiple paths to your end goal. I'm responding super-late, since I just saw this, but I hope it is in some way helpful. There are very few of us on these forums! I am curious to know what happened, if you reported them or not, and what the result was.