Danny Shelton: Building cultural connections

University of Washington student and Husky football player Danny Shelton is a familiar face at the Burke Museum. As a student he completed several independent study courses at the Burke with Holly Barker, curator of Oceanic and Asian culture, building a stronger connection to his heritage in the process. During that time, Danny became an inspiration for his fellow classmates, encouraging them to utilize the Museum for their own cultural research and leading lessons about Polynesian culture for K-12 students at the Burke and beyond.

An article about Danny’s journey appeared in yesterday's Seattle Times. In the article, Holly said she's "proud of how [Danny] opened the museum's doors for many of his UW teammates, particularly the tight knit Polynesian players, to follow through on his work there." And she is proud. We all are!

As Danny prepares for the NFL draft tomorrow night in Chicago, we want to celebrate his time at the Burke and honor him for the work he’s done and the doors he’s helped open for so many others seeking connections to their cultural heritage.

Danny carefully glues parts on a pump drill as John Timu looks on.

The following is an excerpt from the introduction Holly gave Danny as the honored guest at our Curators Dinner this past Friday evening. 

We honor Danny for the many facets we have all come to know and love during his time at the Burke—attributes beyond his outstanding career as a Husky football player.

At the Burke, we honor...

Archaeology at an Insane Asylum

Imagine the Archaeology Department’s surprise when they got a call from the WA State Archives requesting help with 12 boxes of artifacts from the Insane Asylum of Washington Territory. 

Turns out that along with the historic hospital records from what has become Western State Hospital in Lakewood, WA, some artifacts were also transferred to the State Archives. The State Archivist realized these collections belonged in an appropriate repository, and contacted the Burke Museum.

But why are there artifacts coming from the Western State Hospital, the State’s psychiatric hospital? Due to the proposed construction of a new wing in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Office of Public Archaeology on the University of Washington campus were called in to investigate the land that is part of the Fort Steilacoom Historic District. 

Archaeologists identified, among other things, remnants of a wooden structure dating to circa 1850-1890 and a privy dating to circa 1850-1920. This site was originally a Steilacoom band winter settlement site. In the 1830s, the site was occupied by Joseph Thomas Heath, who ran a Hudson’s Bay Company farm. It was taken over by the U.S. Army in 1849 when Heath succumbed to measles. The U.S. Army established Fort Steilacoom which housed a military hospital and surgeon’s quarters. The fort was abandoned in the 1868, and was purchased by Washington Territory, in part, to establish a facility for psychiatric patients.

This Fall, a group of UW Museology students from Museum 581: Preservation and Management of Collections, has been working with the Burke Museum's Archaeology department to rehouse and catalog the artifacts found at the site.

The artifacts include glass bottles and fragments, nails, clay pipes, ceramic sherds, metal buttons, bricks and a favorite here in the Archaeology lab, a leather shoe with shoelaces intact. This project provides a learning experience for Museology students in terms of the depth and breadth of archaeological collections, as well as the practical experience of organizing such a varied collection.

Student Work at the Burke

It’s the start of a new school year, and we’re excited to see the campus and the museum full of students again! How could you be anything but excited? At the Burke Museum, students are at the heart of our work. They assist and lead in research, volunteer in collections and provide valuable work through internships and practicums.

Arryn Davis and Mary Jane Ides, University of Washington students who are also a part of the Burke education staff, spent part of their summer working on amazing costumes for our ¡Carnaval! exhibit. In this video, Arryn describes some of the pieces she worked on that represent Carnival costumes from communities around the world. You can try on their creations yourself by visiting the exhibit – and if you’re a UW student you get in for FREE with your UW ID!

Posted by: Andrea Barber, Communications

Burke Grad Students Awarded NSF Fellowships!

Congrats to two UW graduate students working with Burke Curator of Genetic Resources and Herpetology, Adam Leache: Matt McElroy and Rebecca Harris! They were recently awarded prestigious National Science Foundation Fellowships. The fellowships strive to fund graduate students who have a history of being successful at research and outreach. The fellowship provides three years of funding, allowing Matt and Rebecca to dedicate more time to research. It’s no wonder they were awarded this prestigious award, they’re both studying really cool things!

Matt is interested in how lizards adapt to different thermal environments and will be traveling to Puerto Rico to study Anolis lizard species.

Matt: “I am interested in how lizards adapt to different thermal environments. Since lizards absorb heat from the sun and their surroundings, the habitat a lizard finds itself in will influence its body temperate and physiological performance. On Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, species of Anolis lizards utilize either cool closed-canopy forests or hot open-canopy habitats. Interestingly, closely related species in this group use different thermal environments, indicating that species may have diversified when populations adapted to different thermal habitats. At some point in Puerto Rico’s past, four species split into eight, and my research aims to understand how and why this happened.”

Matt: “I am really excited to go to Puerto Rico and collect lizards and genetic material for this project. Doing fieldwork is an amazing experience – you learn a lot about new habitats, new animals, new cultures, even new things about yourself. As I prepare for summer fieldwork, you may find me reading articles in the office or practicing my baile de salsa out on the dance floor!”



Rebecca is pursuing how species change through hybridization and how large chunks of DNA are transferred when two different species hybridize.

Rebecca: “Evolution occurs at multiple different levels, including changes in the structure and organization of chromosomes. I’m interested in the role of these changes in speciation and how these large chunks of DNA transfer when two different species hybridize. In 1983, the Pytilia finches, a genus of African finches, were shown to have numerous chromosomal rearrangements, but no technology was available to look any closer at these areas. Now, thanks to the human genome project, there are techniques available to explore the actual nature of these rearrangements – a task made even easier by the completion of the zebra finch genome. My proposed study system is a two Pytilia species thought to be hybridizing in the mountains of Malawi.”

Kryostega, Thrinaxodon, Lystrosaurus...oh my!

We've been reporting on the Antarctic fossil expedition that our vertebrate paleontology curator and two of his graduate students are currently part of, and we're getting really excited for them to return to Seattle in a couple of weeks! Once they have a chance to share which fossils they found, we'll definitely post about it on this blog.

You may have watched the video we posted earlier of UW grad students Brandon and Adam describing what their journey to the southern-most continent would be like; in the same recording session, they also talked about why they were going to Antarctica to look for fossils. The second half of the video is a short tour of some of the Antarctic specimens currently in the paleontology collection at the museum (Kryostega! Thrinaxodon! Lystrosaurus!). Take a look:



Posted by: Samantha Porter

B-U-R-K-E now on campus!

If you’re at Red Square on the UW campus anytime soon, you’ll notice a new installation of panels between Kane Hall and Odegaard Library.

These panels are part of a larger on-campus visual campaign for the Burke Museum that has been developed by the UW’s Visual Communication Design program. A senior in the design program, Jessica, proposed an exciting concept and developed a whole suite of materials to help promote the museum to UW students.

Here's a view of the panels from Red Square, spelling out B-U-R-K-E:

Here's a view of the panels from Memorial Way:


More pieces are being developed, including a brochure, buttons, t-shirts, and banners. Keep your eye out for these exciting new materials!

Welcome to campus, UW students!

Today is the first day of school at the University of Washington. Yesterday, to welcome students who are new to campus, the Burke Museum held the annual Chocolate Fair orientation event. About 900 UW students attended the Chocolate Fair and had the privilege of seeing special displays from the ethnology, archaeology, paleontology, genetic resources, mammalogy, fish, and spider collections. And of course, there was a chocolate fountain!

Fisheries

Ethnology

Fossil Prep

Mammalogy

It's good to have the campus buzzing with activity again!

How to create a museum program for university students

As a university museum, the Burke has the privilege and responsibility of finding ways to incorporate the museum into campus life. Many may wonder: how do you reach out to a campus with over 41,000 students?

It may seem like a daunting task, but our staff works hard to help University of Washington students connect to the Burke as both an academic resource and as a place to have a social experience. These two different ways students can engage with the museum blend together in the student-only event called After Hours @ the Burke. Every quarter, the museum hosts this evening event that involves special activities, exhibit access, food, music, and the opportunity to speak with Burke Museum experts about the topic of the evening. This quarter’s program happened last night, April 28.

We began the planning process for After Hours @ the Burke by deciding to focus on the collaboration of both art and science in the exhibit Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway. We came up with a program that invited students to help re-create a Ray Troll mural from Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, make their own fossils out of modeling clay based on the forms of real fossils in the Burke’s collections, talk to experts in the gallery… and eat dinosaur cake!


The next challenge was to figure out how to get the word out to students on campus that this event was happening. We experimented with some new ways to advertise on campus and also used techniques that have worked well in the past. We created and distributed posters, sent e-mail invitations, placed ads in the campus newspaper The Daily, and installed 80 paper ammonites on lawns around campus with sandwich boards advertising the event.



Social media sites have also been a very helpful way to communicate with UW students. The Burke Museum’s Facebook and Twitter pages help us reach out to students on websites they use daily.

In the end, 160 students came to the museum for about 2 hours last night and everyone seemed to have a great time. All of our hard work paid off!

Posted By: Andrea Barber, Communications

"Rocking Out" on the Fossil Freeway

If you have visited the exhibit Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway in recent weekends, you may have encountered UW students hanging out in the gallery, showing off fossils and talking to museum visitors. These students are part of a group called Rocking Out – they focus on presenting hands-on outreach programs in the earth sciences, and they’ve been kind enough to lend their time to the Burke Museum so that visitors have the opportunity to touch real fossils and ask questions about what they see on exhibit.

So what motivates these students to volunteer their time to talk to museum visitors?

Rocking Out member Shelly Donohue describes why she loves volunteering at the museum:

For me, the best part about volunteering in the Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway exhibit is giving kids the opportunity to hold and touch some of the specimens. I am studying science because of educators in my past that took me exploring on field trips, let me hold a snake at the zoo, and energetically answered any question I could think of. These people fed my curiosity and opened me up to how interesting and exciting science can be. When I volunteer, I love giving kids a specimen they can hold, such as a dinosaur vertebra or a fossil shark tooth, and asking them to guess what it is. Some of them get that same excited sparkle in their eyes that I used to get in mine, and it’s great that now I can be the one inspiring curiosity and showing these kids that learning can be fun… or at least to give them bragging rights over their friends about getting to hold a dinosaur bone.

Earth and Space Sciences graduate student Karl Lang discusses his personal favorite fossil – “Jefferson’s Chesapeake Scallop":

This past Thursday was Free First Thursday at the Burke and that evening I was chatting with visitors to the Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway exhibit when I ran into an old friend: Chesapecten jeffersonius. Oh the memories! You see “jeff” and I go way back, at least five million years to the early Pliocene. We originally met in the Yorktown formation, a soft sandy coquina forming large bluffs along the York River in the Virginia coastal plain. Growing up in Virginia, I spent many lazy summer afternoons crawling over these bluffs pulling out handful after handful of Chesapecten jeffersonius.

These shells are the fossilized remnants of a scallop-like creature that dominated the shallow marine seas off the east coast of North America for about five million years in the late Miocene to early Pliocene. The shell is known as an “index fossil” because it is so plentiful over only a short segment of the stratigraphic record, characteristic of a very specific piece of geologic history. Chesapecten jeffersonius has found its way into American history as well. It was the first fossil described in North America by English colonists, and remains the state fossil of Virginia. The Burke museum has a fantastic collection of fossils actively used in research, including this very special scallop. Be sure to stop by the Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway exhibit to say hello and meet the remarkable Chesapecten jeffersonius.

Visit Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway this Saturday from 10 am – 2 pm to meet the members of Rocking Out and try hands-on activities in the gallery.

Filling in for Mammalogy: Part 2

A few weeks ago, I blogged about what it was like as a graduate student to temporarily be put in charge of managing an entire collection of mammals. The job comes with a lot of responsibility, including facilitating the visits of researchers who study specimens from the collection.

While I have interacted with visitors to the collection before, this was the first time that it was my responsibility to make sure they had what they needed, knew where to find the specimens they were looking for, and ensure that all the proper paperwork was filled out. Interacting with these researchers and hearing about their work (not to mention watching them take the data they needed) was definitely one of the most interesting parts of my job.

A budding young researcher uses a special tool to measure the size of a rodent during a behind-the-scenes tours of the mammalogy collection.

The first visitor was Jonathan Calede, a graduate student at the University of Oregon. Jonathan is studying the diet of burrowing rodents that lived during the Miocene. This doesn’t sound difficult until you find out that the only specimens he has to study are tiny fossilized rodent teeth! Luckily, the Burke’s mammal collection provides modern rodents for researchers like Jonathan to study. Since we know what modern mammals eat, their teeth serve as great comparisons.

Jonathan has taken some specimens back to Oregon with him, but most of his work was done in the mammal collection itself. First he chose which specimens to study and cleaned the teeth with ethanol. He then made molds of the teeth using the same blue molding compound that dentists use. When the mold is dry it can be peeled off and later filled with epoxy to make a cast of the teeth.

The second researcher was Casey Self, a University of Washington biology graduate student. Casey is also studying teeth and their relationship to diet, but in modern bats rather than rodents. She uses the Small Animal Tomographic Analysis facility (SANTA) in the Department of Pediatrics to micro-CT scan the bat skulls and measure the volume and surface area of the tooth roots. Because Casey cannot remove the teeth from the skulls (as that could compromise the specimens in the collection), this is a non-destructive, highly accurate alternative. Casey has used the collection many times before and will definitely be back to complete more research in the future.

The final visitor was Jacob Fisher, an archaeology PhD candidate at the University of Washington. Jacob uses the mammal collection to identify prehistoric faunal skeleton remains from Five Finger Ridge, an archaeological site occupied during the Fremont-period (AD 450-1350) in central Utah.

During his most recent visit to the mammal collection Jacob focused on identifying rodents, which provide important data on the past environmental conditions at the site. There are larger questions that Jacob is trying to answer with his research. In his words: “the goal of my research is to understand how people impacted the environment, and in particular how underlying motivations for hunting by men may result in resource depletion of some game animals.”

All of the Burke Museum’s collections, not just mammalogy, support interesting research. I am glad I had the opportunity to help a few of those researchers in my time filling in for our regular mammalogy collections manager.

Posted by: Justine Walker, Mammalogy

Q: What will you find at a natural history-themed pub quiz?

A: Over 70 intrepid quiz-takers, ready to prove their knowledge of the natural and cultural world!

Burke Museum Trivia Night is a brand new outreach program that started last Thursday at the College Inn Pub in the University District. We were treated to a hugely successful turnout of UW graduate students and others who came to test their knowledge of the natural and cultural world. Fifteen teams competed for prizes (drink vouchers from the Pub and museum passes from the Burke) and everyone seemed to have a really great time.

I’ve been excited to start this program for a while now, so it was really gratifying to see it come together so seamlessly. The idea came to me this summer as I was brainstorming creative ways to share the collective knowledge of the Burke Museum with people beyond the walls of the exhibit galleries. A regular pub quiz seemed like a good way to expose new audiences to the many, many subjects covered by our museum. I mean, who doesn’t love drinking beer with friends and showing off how much you know about random subjects?

I was lucky to receive instant support for the idea from the Burke’s director, along with generous financial support from the UW Graduate School . Then, I found the perfect venue for Burke Museum Trivia Night—the College Inn Pub. I liked the College Inn Pub because it’s close to campus, has a nice, laid-back atmosphere, and already attracts a lot of grad students who I thought might be interested in coming to a natural history-themed pub quiz.

The quiz consisted of 6 different rounds (the topics for each round will change each month) of 5 questions each plus a bonus round at half-time. All of the questions had to do with subjects that relate directly or indirectly to Burke collections, exhibits, or research. We also featured a picture ID round and a rock ID round, using images and objects from the Burke’s collections. Here are some sample questions from the first Burke Museum Trivia Night:

From the “Mount Saint Helens” round: In what year did Mt. St. Helens erupt?
From the “Antarctica” round: The United States operates three Antarctic bases devoted to research. Name 1 of those stations.
From the “Where in Washington” round: Where in Washington will you find a Washington city whose name means “place of many waters” in the Nez Perce language for its proximity to both the Columbia and Snake Rivers?
From the “Dinosaur Movies” round: Which dinosaur does NOT make an appearance in the first Jurassic Park movie? A: Stegosaurus B: Tyrannosaurus Rex C: Brachiosaurus D: Triceratops
From the “Holidays” round: Which Mexican holiday honors and remembers friends and family members who have passed away?

Think you know the answers to these questions and others like them? Then come to the next Burke Museum Trivia Night on November 5. If you miss that, we’ll be back on the first Thursday of every month.

Oh, and that's me, hosting the first Trivia Night, wearing a moose hat that one of the teams let me wear for the second half of the game. It never hurts to be cheesy!

Posted by: Julia Swan, Communications

Hands-on experience: the Burke Museum and Museology

The field of museology is undergoing exciting changes and facing new questions which challenge even the most skilled and experienced people in museums. Interdisciplinary skills, new technologies and debating the purpose of museological institutions are a few reasons why I have been anxiously awaiting the start of my graduate studies at the University of Washington’s Museology program.

My name is Andrea Barber and I am the new Outreach Assistant in the Burke Museum’s communications department. Continuing my education while gaining practical knowledge in a field that I am passionate about has been my main goal while applying to graduate schools, and I knew the moment I heard about the Museology department at the University of Washington that it was a perfect fit for me. While completing a Master of Arts, Museology students can get hands-on experience in museums by walking up one flight of stairs and stepping foot onto the Burke Museum’s floors. Internships are available in virtually every department, and there are even audience research courses that have a readily available visitor base at our fingertips.

The Burke Museum provides Museology students the opportunity to apply the knowledge they’re learning as it is being taught in the classroom while simultaneously participating in an environment that could potentially be a source of future employment. During the next two years, I, along with all other 32 members of my class, have the opportunity to explore my particular interests, form lasting connections with Burke Museum mentors and learn how to enhance my skills as part of a museum team. These experiences are invaluable, and I look forward to every minute of it.

Posted by: Andrea Barber, Communications

Photo: UW Museology student takes measurements for artifact catalog records in the Archaeology department

Q: How does one go about moving 650 pieces of ceramic pottery from the Burke Museum to a new storage facility?

A: Very, very carefully!

As the Ethnology Department staff prepare to move the pottery collection to a new storage facility, one student looks back on the project with fond memories.

Posted by: Sarah Bishop, Ethnology

The packing project took our staff 4 months to complete, over 40 HUGE bags of biodegradable packing peanuts and resulted in a nearly 10-foot-high "box mountain" in the Ethnology storage area.

So, out of all the artifacts we have here in Ethnology, why move the pottery collection to this new storage space? The ceramic and pottery collections are not prone to insect damage and are relatively stable to small environmental changes (temperature and relative humidity). But it is also easier to care for similar types of objects when they are all stored in the same area, so a decision was made to put all of the pottery together. This will make it easier for researchers, students, artists and scholars to access and study the collections, and make comparative analysis between pottery styles.

Improper handling is the number one cause of damage to ceramics and pottery, so proper packaging for transport is extremely important. We tightly packed each ceramic object in biodegradable packing peanuts and sheets of Ethafoam (polyethylene foam). Each pot was wrapped in tissue paper to keep all of its pieces together in case of physical damage during transport. Extremely fragile ceramic objects needed to be stabilized before moving to prevent further damage. After each pot was packed, we wrote down the box number on inventory sheets so we could track which pots are in each of the boxes. This inventory is very important to ensure no artifacts are lost during the big move.

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After sealing each box with packing tape, we stacked them in the Ethnology Collection to await transport to the storage facility. After several games of Tetris at the video arcade the previous weekend, I was inspired to create "box mountain." The tower is secured (and protected from damage from earthquakes) with copious amounts of packing tape and is raised above the floor by two-by-fours to protect the ceramics in case of flooding. This stack of boxes saves invaluable collections space for us in the Ethnology Division. Now that the pottery collection is all packed up, it is currently awaiting transport to its new home!

Meanwhile, the collections manager and curator had to secure some necessary funding to purchase storage equipment for the pottery collections to be housed in. It is important to have strong equipment for the heavy pots to sit on, and large storage cabinets with closed doors to reduce dust. And of course, having been through minor earthquakes in the Seattle area, we need to make individual storage mounts for each piece of pottery so it doesn't roll or shake around too much.


Photos: Burke Museum collections staff and student assistants take great care in moving the museum's pottery collection to another storage facility. Sarah Bishop (bottom right) thinks creatively about how to store all of the boxed pottery pieces while they await transport.

A whole latte coffee facts (and only one bad pun!)

Posted by: Julia Swan, Communications

Can't get enough of coffee? Maybe you visited Coffee: The World in Your Cup and need a quick refresher on some of the interesting facts you learned about coffee production? Or perhaps you just stumbled upon this blog while you were browsing for more information about how coffee is grown, processed, and consumed?

Take a look at these two slide shows, both created by University of Washington students who participated in an "Exploration Seminar" that took them to Costa Rica and Nicaragua to study coffee first hand. Click on either slide show to view the slides individually.

First up, a look at the growing process by Kimberly Bailor:

Second, a look at shade-grown coffee practices by Scott Swan:

I really did get my picture taken with a giant polar bear!

Check out photos from After Hours at the Burke, including photos with Snowflake the giant polar bear, the UW's Polar Science Center, and more:

Calling all UW students

Hey UW students! Come to After Hours @ the Burke tomorrow (Wednesday, Oct. 1) night for a fun "Night in the Arctic" with Snowflake the giant polar bear, free Klondike bars, the UW Polar Science Center and more. Just show your ID between 7-9 pm to get in FREE to this exclusive student event!

"Snowflake" the giant polar bear roams the Burke lobby during the opening of the Last Polar Bear exhibit.

Chocolate Fair photos

As a favorite event during the UW's Dawg Daze orientation week, the Chocolate Fair welcomes new students to the Burke Museum every fall. It was a lot of to see 984 UW students come to the museum to dip into our chocolate fountain and learn a little something about the 12 million objects at the Burke.

Last Polar Bear Summer Camp: A Recap

Posted by: Keely Gnagy and Tim Stetter

What do you get when you cross a dozen middle school students with cameras, a polar bear exhibit, and researchers on the UW campus? Fantastic photography exhibits about environmental issues! The students joined Burke Education staff during the week of July 14 for a summer camp based on the current Burke exhibit, The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World. During the camp, the students learned about the basics of climate science, some of the challenges we are likely to face because of it, and what we can do about it.

One of the things we can do is raise awareness about an issue that is important to us, just like Steven Kazlowski, the photographer of “The Last Polar Bear,” did by taking photographs to bring attention to the plight of the polar bear in the warming Arctic. Using disposable cameras, what they learned throughout the week, and their imaginations, the campers created their own exhibits focused on topics such as recycling, transportation choices, native and non-native plants, human eco-footprints, and the power and beauty of nature.

The Burke’s collection was a fantastic resource for the campers. They were able to touch polar bear fur and stand nose to nose with a polar bear skull from the Mammalogy Collection. We saw angler fish, sharks, and sun fish at the Burke’s incredible Fish Collection with tour guide Rachel Schoen, a graduate student in Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. And we were able to use artifacts from Arctic culture, like snow goggles and the intestine material used to make rainproof gear, to imagine the life of a person living in the Arctic environment.

We also learned a lot and had a great time visiting other research centers and talking to scientists on the UW campus. Dr. Kevin Rennert from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences taught us about climate change and the Arctic. We learned about ways plants adapt to climate with Fleur Beckwith, a graduate student at the Botany Greenhouse. We visited the Applied Physics Lab and talked with Dr. Mike Steele, an oceanographer at the Polar Science Center. And we learned about cameras and photography from professional photographer Joe Burnett.

On Friday afternoon, the students displayed their exhibits in the Burke Room. Friends and family attended a reception in their honor. One visitor commented, “I wish I was a kid so I could be in this camp!”

What an awesome week! And what incredible photography exhibits. It was an honor to spend the week with students who are so motivated to learn and to make a difference.

- Keely and Tim

A Fresh Perspective on Climate Change

Posted by: Julia Swan

The Burke is preparing to host almost 40 climatologists, documentary filmmakers, and photographers next week. No, we’re not gearing up for a major conference or convention—we are actually waiting for the arrival of middle and high school students, passionate about the environment, who will attend two great new summer programs: Climate Quest (for high school) and The Last Polar Bear Summer Camp (for middle school).

Climate Quest students will take a University of Washington science and policy class on climate change and produce mini-documentary films capturing their ideas and solutions. Program highlights include taking a field trip to the Cedar River Watershed to meet climate scientists, participating in a live videoconference with Climate Quest students at Western Washington University, and sharing their videos on a national website for youth, www.climatequest.net.

Middle school students in The Last Polar Bear Summer Camp will learn about the basics of climate change, impacts on the arctic ecosystem, and actions that people can take. As a culminating project, students will take their own photos and create a photography exhibit documenting their thinking on climate change, which will be on view at the museum on Friday, July 18 from 2-4 pm.

Its gonna be very cool…or hot (depending on the summer weather)…having these young minds in the museum for a week, brainstorming about ways to tackle climate change. I for one am excited to hear their ideas!

- Julia

Reaching out to undergrads

Posted by: Steven Zhang

“Have you been to the Burke Museum before?”

This is a typical question I ask undergraduates during campus outreach opportunities. Among the positive responses I receive, once in a while there are a few “No, I haven’t gotten around to it” or “I’ve been meaning to.” Occasionally, some students say they’re not exactly sure where the Burke is located. As a fellow undergraduate working at the Burke, I understand where these responses are coming from. Before my employment at the museum, I had heard of the Burke many times, through flyers, posters, and articles in The Daily. But like many undergraduates, I simply did not take the extra step to check it out. However, it

is enlightening to see that more and more students are making an effort to come to the Burke. Working here for the past two years, I know this success can be attributed to the Burke events that are geared towards reaching out to undergraduates.

One example of these outreach events is the Burke’s After Hours program, which has been quite successful. Once a quarter, the museum re-opens in the evening, providing live music, big screen movies, exhibit tours, and free food to all UW students! This is a great way for students to experience the Burke in an upbeat and contemporary atmosphere. Some highlights from previous After Hours featured a live DJ, Mighty-O Donuts, Blue C Sushi, and filmmakers Alicia Woods and Jonathan Tomhave. Speaking of which, the Burke’s last After Hours of the academic year is on Wed., May 21 at 7pm. The topic is “Prehistoric Drugs, Sex and Vice!” So stop by and enjoy free pizza and chocolate while learning about the “sexy” culture of ancient societies!

- Steven

Photo: Undergraduate students enjoy sushi and socializing at an After Hours @ the Burke event.