About Museum

What is Museum?

Every year, the FYSOP Museum serves as a platform for students to learn about their new community, reflect on its history, and more deeply understand their role in the city of Boston. Our intention is to have Museum be a place for conversations to spark, from areas such as local museums, to Massachusetts’ plan for combating climate change, to various minority groups in the Greater Boston area. We want students to feel like they can belong to this community and to leave having found at least one thing they can relate to. We hope that each student is intentional in their self-guided tour through this year’s Museum, delving deeper into topics that particularly piques their interest.


 

Mission

For this year’s Museum, we will connect incoming students to the city of Boston and its rich history, including both positive and negative aspects, through a personal website dedicated to compiling comprehensive resources and information with which first-year students can connect. We will engage students and staff leaders alike by incorporating meaningful, interactive exhibits, such as videos, interactive presentations, Zoom breakout rooms, Google maps, and pen pal systems. We will utilize each focus area to talk independently about specific topics to be incorporated into the Museum, whether that be about events and issues that relate to their focus area, their favorite neighborhood, T line, or cultural aspect of Boston, or any other special experience a Coordinator has had viewing past Museums or interacting with the people of Boston. We will have First-Years engage with a member of the BU/Boston community in a live discussion as part of the virtual museum experience. 

 

Vision

In this year’s Museum, we hope to lay “foundations” for incoming students regarding how they interact with the city of Boston as active citizens. Museum will provide an experience wherein first-year students at Boston University are given the opportunity to explore the greater Boston area and connect with the communities that make up the city. We aim to do this through interactive exhibits, informational videos and articles, live conversations with individuals of the BU and Boston community, and other means that encourage self-reflection and promote social justice. Additionally, we aim to contextualize how moments and issues of Boston’s past continue to interact with current events, specifically in terms of public health and human rights. In this way, Museum will inform incoming students about the social justice issues in Boston in a personal manner, with the goal of bringing modern experiences in the context of social injustices that Boston faces on a systemic level. This gives first-year students, especially those who have never visited the city of Boston before, a personal and detailed look at the culture of the Greater Boston Area. By creating this year’s Museum on a virtual platform, this allows for it to exist beyond the period of FYSOP and beyond the CSC, acting as a resource that students can continue to reference or revisit throughout their time at the university. At its core, Museum will act as a foundation for first-year students, engaging them in a way that will promote deeper reflection on their past experiences and challenging them to think about their place in Boston.