thank you, for a reply, and for a recommendation of the Winterthur Program. I am incredibly interested in material culture, so this is right up my alley.
As far as "in the field" I meant specifically the world of museum work, not academia. I thought I'd made that clear from my previous post, but yeah, I'd love to join an archive or museum in a research/curatorial/etc position. I have two years of museum work under my belt, including grant writing, brainstorming exhibits and programming, writing copy for monthly calendar and newsletter, working with donors, etc. But I genuinely feel I'm lacking a great deal of the information I'd like to have, and that I won't be able to move forward into a genuinely research based historian position without more schooling.
I completely agree with you about the worth of funding. I have no interest in being saddled with loans I cannot afford, and I do believe a good solid educational foundation is what matters, not the Ivy associations, whatever, what-have-you of an institution. I know that programs are not golden tickets, and that I'll need internships, networking, good work, and luck to get forward.
That's why standing within context matters to me. I feel like I'm better situated to succeed if I'm better situated to get meaningful internships and meet great people, and the program I attend will affect those things.
As to my specific interests, I'm afraid that I'm very interested in just about everything relating to preservation of materials, which is a terrible answer, but I am very interested in the sociological/cultural relationship between people and created environments/objects and the cyclical nature of these relationships. I'm sorry if I'm not expressing that entirely clearly, I hope that sounds reasonable.
Honestly, I think I need to do a lot more reading, and apply next year, because I don't feel I have my research goals fully articulated. A short sharp answer would be, "I want to get in as a means of wedging a little stepping stool under the next rung on the ladder" but honestly, two years time commitment should be worth more than that, so I think this is going to be a year of fact-finding and refining.
I had been veering away from History programs with museum studies concentrations as I've been worried that professors and resources wouldn't be committed enough supporting a public history angle, but I'd love to hear more of your argument that a regular history program with some internships may be the way to go.
On a side note, I became interested in researching Public History programs rather than Museum Studies partly because I'm much more interested in the historic record than in art history and partly because what I did turn up seemed to echo many of your complaints regarding public history programs. It does seem there is a lot of saturation in this area of interest