OMA 2026 Student Scholarship Blog - Ellenora Chevraux

The Ohio Museums Association is committed to connecting and empowering museum professionals at all stages of their career — including our student and emerging museum professionals!

For our 2026 OMA Annual Conference, OMA was very proud to offer students seeking careers in the museum field, scholarships to attend OMA 2026 in Columbus.

We're closing out our 2026 Conference series with this week's post from Student Scholarship Winner, Ellenora Chevraux! Nora is a rising junior at the University of Exeter, studying Ancient History and Archaeology.

Did you miss our previous Conference Blog posts? Learn more about the Conference Blog series and read our previous entries here.

OMA 2026

I have had an interest in museum work for as long as I can remember. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of trips to local museums with my family, learning about art and history. I was thrilled to receive a scholarship to the 2026 Ohio Museums Association conference. In past years I had come to the conference as my mother’s helper, but this year I was able to attend as a recipient of the OMA Student Scholarship.

I study ancient history and archaeology at the University of Exeter in Southwest England, but a focus of my research is museum heritage and repatriation. This year’s conference theme, “Resilience through Growth: From Firsts to Futures”, was a perfect opportunity for me to take a deeper dive into the practical aspects of my interests.

At the conference, I attended four seminars and one workshop: a behind-the-scenes tour of a state-of-the-art museum collection, a presentation on exhibit engagement through games, a seminar on the maintenance of historic buildings, and two sessions on museum and library collaborations. They were all both informative and engaging, and especially helpful to me as a student exploring new aspects of the museum world. The seminar “‘I'm Board’ - Ideas on how to ‘Game-ify’ your Collections Using Non-Digital Games” sparked a plan for my undergrad dissertation, in which I will research how interactive exhibits affect museum viewership and guests’ engagement. In addition to surveys and research, I want to collaborate with a museum and create my own interactive experience or game for one of their exhibits. The OMA conference provided me with inspiration for this project that I would not have had otherwise.

I would like to thank the Ohio Museums Association for giving me this scholarship and this opportunity. It was an enlightening experience, both from an educational and personal perspective, and I hope to attend next year’s conference.