When I first stumbled into the Smith College Art Museum, looking to explore my love of museums through new avenues of involvement, I found myself in conversation with then chief conservator, Bill Meyers. He encouraged me to join the museum’s small Frame Conservation Apprenticeship Program which met on Fridays. As a new member of the Smith community, the frameworks program provided me with a sense of camaraderie that I was searching for, but it also opened the door to an eventual trajectory within the museums world that I could have never foreseen. Within this conservation lab setting I was able to begin exploring the ways in which conservation works on a micro-level. Simultaneous to this, I also began see how it manifested in macro settings through my academic courses in material culture, art histories, landscape studies, and architectural historic preservation. Soon, my interests in the Middle-East, the built-environment, and conservation seemed less like disparate ends of interests and far more like the intersectional means of a future path. The museums concentration presented itself as an appropriate platform through which to hone this intersection and expand my understanding of its praxis within the real world. Since beginning the concentration I have been able to explore ethics of conservation and historic preservation policy within a variety of contexts. Private conservation practice, conservation in museum labs, historic preservation & community storytelling, and international cultural heritage preservation. Issues of museums and galleries as public platforms for storytelling have been central to all of these explorations. Questions of power relations in socially constructed value, constitutions of knowledge, disposability, entropy, and spectacle have pulled me along in my research and encouraged me to think critically about the world around me. I look forward to continuing this contemplative and hands-on work into the future both in my career and in continuing my education.