Clement Onn
Masters of Museum Studies
"I really enjoyed the MA of Museum Studies back in UQ. I remember the time when I first enrolled into the postgraduate course, I was a little lost and was pondering over those “what am I going to do in the near future” kind of questions? Back then, I just finished my honours degree and was not happy with where I am heading to. But this course has given me back my confidence. I believe the teaching staffs have a lot of credit in that aspect. Over the one and a half years I was given several different opportunities to meet and work with museum professionals from various organisations".
"Since August last year when I returned to Singapore, I came on board as a research assistant to the Asian Civilisations Museum working on a temporary exhibition, ‘On the Nalanda Trail: Buddhism in India, China and Southeast Asia’. It was a tremendous experience for me. Throughout the first three months, I have been working with the senior curator Dr Gauri Parimoo Krishnan on exhibition planning, several meetings with the designers on the exhibition layout and design, communicating with the lenders and proofing of texts. The overall feedback for the exhibition was positive and visitors enjoyed learning more about the life of Buddha and his representation through art forms. It is notable in the exhibition that there are many similarities and difference in the stylistic representations of Buddhist art across India, China and Southeast Asia. On the other hand, we are also trying to convey that interaction between these three regions have been established more than a thousand years ago. After which, we worked on the production of the exhibition catalogue. We have already sold out both our first and second printings of the catalogue".
"I am confident of my knowledge which I have learnt during the postgraduate course in terms of understanding how to plan for an exhibition and working on the different layers of texts for different levels of visitors. I took event management as my elective and I found it extremely useful too. The knowledge I gained prepared myself to be more organised and insightful as I applied it when I was organising the ‘Interaction & Practice’, conference in conjunction with the ‘On the Nalanda Trail’ exhibition. The conference follows closely to the themes of our exhibition and we managed to invited renowned scholars to present new findings and new interpretations in their specialised fields. The response was overwhelming and we received many positive feedbacks on it".