UAlbany Summer: Museum Internship Helps Grad Student Find Her Future by Sharing the Past

By Amy Geduldig

ALBANY, N.Y. (Aug. 5, 2025) — As a child, Hannah Tompkins remembers walking the streets of Colonial Williamsburg and exploring museums across the East Coast. Her parents — both educators — made a point of exposing her to places that brought the past to life. For Tompkins, those early encounters weren’t just educational; they were accessible. History felt tangible and served as a connection to people and places that shaped the world.

The experience of being welcomed into the past is now shaping her future. As a graduate student in UAlbany’s Public History master’s program, Tompkins is building a career centered around making history more available to the public— through exhibitions, archives and museum education. But she didn’t always see public history as a viable path.  

“All the way through college, I thought that was really... silly, or like a little too much,” she said. 

After earning a degree in art history at the University of the South, she took a job teaching ninth-grade World History at a private K-12 school in 2019. 

Six months later, the pandemic changed everything. She found herself redesigning her lesson plans to fit a virtual model — introducing core writing skills, Chicago-style citation and, most notably, virtual museum field trips to help her students stay connected to history.  

During these visits, she was reminded how much she valued engaging with history — and began to consider how she could use her background to pursue more hands-on, public-facing work outside the classroom.  

“It’s not that I didn’t like teaching, but I wasn’t maybe prepared for everything that went into it,” she said. “I knew I liked talking about history and I knew I loved sharing history with people.” That realization eventually led her to UAlbany.

Now entering her final year of graduate school, Tompkins is spending her summer as an intern at the Seward House Museum in Auburn, N.Y. At the museum, she’s putting theory into practice — not just guiding tours but helping the museum reach new audiences.

“They really were interested in my expertise in the education side, so I was asked to look over the curriculum and update the standards that apply to the tour and the existing lesson plans.”

Tapping into her teaching experience, Tompkins noted a lack of materials for high schoolers and has been working on creating new materials for grades 9–12, building lesson plans and activities that will connect older students to the history of the Seward family and important moments in New York State.

She’s also developing a specialty tour on the architectural history of the house — a natural tie to her art history background — and conducting research she hopes to shape into a master’s thesis on the Seward family’s influence on 19th-century criminal law.

For Tompkins, the power of public history lies in participation. “For me, it's always been a deeper appreciation of where I'm living or the places that I've been,” she said. “I often think about how many other people have experienced the environment that I'm now getting to experience. And if we want people to benefit from it, you have to have some upkeep around it. People need to be included in that. Whether it's a downtown revitalization project or something else, it's got to include the community.”

Through her graduate studies and fieldwork, she’s building the skills and the vision to ensure history is brought to life in ways that resonate with real people, in real places.

“My goal in all of this is to create a more accessible understanding of history so we can hopefully help communities.”