The Courtauld vigorously supports its students' paths into careers in the art world and beyond by offering the best opportunities for them to develop and demonstrate the requisite skills and experience.  Our graduates have gone on to careers as professional art historians and conservators, artists and critics, art dealers and curators (including directors of many of the world's leading galleries and museums); but they have also become journalists, actors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, publishers, teachers and civil servants.

Three of our postgraduate programmes provide advanced professional education. Virtually all graduates of the MA in the Conservation of Wall Painting, the Postgraduate Diploma in the Conservation of Easel Paintings, and the MA in Curating the Art Museum have gone on to careers in these specialist fields.

For the history of art, acquisition of highly transferable skills is built into our programmes at all levels (BA, Graduate Diploma, MA, MPhil/PhD programme).  For example, Courtauld BA graduates are not only equipped with a detailed knowledge and systematic, historical understanding of Western Art, but will also have developed the skills and critical curiosity necessary for participation in a range of career paths. They will have learned to analyse visual imagery, and to articulate sophisticated ideas about it in formal writing; they will have learned to read critically and economically, to assimilate complex material and to formulate different kinds of arguments. They will have experienced independent research, collaborative work in groups, and the presentation of ideas to an audience.  The Graduate Diploma offers similar skills in a compressed 9-month course, while the MA and research programmes develop academic and critical abilities at the level of advanced study and professional research.

Careers Preparation


All students are offered careers preparation in collaboration with the University of London Careers Group, providing individual advice on-site and in their offices at neighbouring King's College. Besides information on work experience, part-time work, graduate training schemes, and further study, the Careers Group guides students in preparing excellent CVs and applications, as well as helping them prepare successfully for interviews and assessment centres.

Alumni Support


An annual cycle of careers events is run by the Courtauld Association (the association of current and former staff and students) and draws upon the expertise of our alumni. The Association hosts regular, very well-attended sessions for students with guest speakers who provide careers information and progression guidance; it also identifies employment and internship opportunities (which are often exclusively available for Courtauld students and alumni).  The Courtauld Association website includes an online 'Careers Centre', including a facility for uploading curricula vitae.  The alumni of the Courtauld Association help us to gain feedback from employers about the profile of our graduates, which in turn helps us continuously to improve our employability strategy.


Internships and Work Experience


For the professional programmes Internships are integral to the curricula.  The MA in Curating the Art Museum assigns each student to a six-month, two-day-a-week placement in a leading London museum or gallery. Students on the conservation programmes develop their professional skills by working on real projects for a significant proportion of their three years of study. For easel painting, this includes works from The Courtauld Gallery as well as the National Trust and various other owners. This provides not only invaluable technical diversity but immersion in varying structures of curating, collections management and preventive conservation. Similarly, for wall painting conservation, international fieldwork projects in Europe and Asia, many at World Heritage sites, offer technical challenges and team-building while introducing the international student body to diverse administrative infrastructures.

For History of Art students, two partnerships offer a route to professional experience:

  • Courtauld-Sotheby's unpaid internships give 15 students each year a chance to work in a leading auction-house.

  • The Courtauld-Bluelabel internship collaboration: Bluelabel, a commercially managed website, enables artists to create ‘birth certificates’ for their artworks that can be managed, collected, sent and viewed by Bluelabel members. Each year ten Courtauld undergraduates receive two-week paid placements at a gallery or artist’s studio where they worked closely with the artist/curator to collect art data for storage on Bluelabel’s huge online database for public access

Work experience is also available to current students in various departments of the Institute including paid internships in the Prints & Drawings Study Room and positions in the Witt and Conway photographic libraries, as well as opportunities to give Gallery talks and training for such work. The student-curated East Wing Collection has given many undergraduates a valuable experience of exhibition curating a loan exhibition.  Every year Research Associates are appointed from the student body to work on aspects of The Courtauld’s collections in a project organised by the Research Forum of The Courtauld.  The Research Forum offers students valuable experience in organising public scholarly events with the full support of professional administrators and academic advisors.

These internal opportunities complement a wide range of paid and unpaid external internships or part-time and temporary jobs regularly available in London, which are frequently filled by Courtauld students and graduates.

 

Jacky Klein, MA History of Art 2001
Jacky Klein is Commissioning Editor at the art publisher Thames & Hudson. She came to The Courtauld after a first degree in modern history at Oxford. After graduating from the MA History of Art programme, she worked at the Courtauld Gallery, the Barbican Art Gallery and Tate, and was a curator at the Hayward Gallery. She writes and lectures on twentieth-century and contemporary art, and is the author of Grayson Perry (2009).


Nicholas Cullinan, BA 2002, MA History of Art 2003, PhD 2010
A graduate of three Courtauld programmes, Nicholas Cullinan is Curator of International Modern Art at Tate Modern, London, where he has worked on a range of exhibitions,  including  Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia; Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons; and Pop Life: Art In A Material World.  He completed his PhD under the supervision of Prof Sarah Wilson and has worked at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York, Bilbao and Venice before joining Tate Modern.  He writes regularly for journals such as Artforum, The Burlington Magazine, Frieze and October.


Michael Parsons, BA 2005
After graduating from The Courtauld, Michael Parsons joined Dalton Strategic Partnership as an Analyst and Assistant Fund Manager on a European equity fund. He now works on the client portfolio management team at Lord North Street Limited, a London-based private investment office that manages the investments of a small number of private clients, charities and endowments.


Juana Segura Escobar, MA in Wall Painting Conservation 2010
Juana Segura came to The Courtauld from her native Colombia for specialist conservation education supported by scholarship funding. Since graduating in 2010, she has worked professionally at projects in India and Malta, as well as supervising Courtauld MA students in Cyprus. Following a lecture tour of Latin America (Buenos Aires, Lima, Bogotá and Mexico City) to present her MA research, she takes up an internship at the Getty Conservation Institute in autumn 2011.