Most 9-year-olds might think of a job as a one-off — helping clean the garage or wash the car — or as a weekly chore, accompanied by appropriate compensation in the high single digits.
Not Eli Navant, who attends third grade at .
When he learned last November that the was looking for a new chief curator to replace Kirk Johnson, who decamped to the National Museum of Natural History, Eli decided to apply for the position.
As a longtime member and regular museum visitor, Eli knew his way around both its cavernous rooms and odd nooks.
As an aspiring paleontologist with some experience at finding fossils and bones, he thought he could handle supervising digs, especially with the help of and , two paleontology curators he particularly admires.
He even had an ace reference in his pocket: paleontologist , whose how scientists interpret dinosaur biology. True, Eli knew Bakker only through a Boulder museum event, where Bakker supervised an in-house mini-dig, but still.
So Eli submitted a portfolio that included his experience: “a few digs, some in my backyard and some on South Table Mountain,” and “Step Through The Eras,” his self-published book on dinosaurs. That book has been a huge hit when Eli has done classroom presentations for students in ‘s kindergarten at Pleasant View Elementary School in Golden.
Maria Hannon, the museum’s director of human resources, was so impressed that she interviewed Eli in person, and told that it “was the best interview I’ve ever done in my career.”
Naturally, Eli had his hopes up. So when the call came that the job had gone to , featured on the PBS show and a member of the museum’s board of trustees, Eli was disappointed.
“It was kinda sad that I didn’t get the job,” he said. “But I’m young, and probably I need to stay in school a little bit longer.”
As consolation, Eli was named on Friday, and made the rounds of the museum’s science departments and met their curators. introduced Eli at a staff meeting, where Eli offered a PowerPoint presentation on his nascent paleontology career.
Afterward, he took questions, offering an insight into the kind of action he would have taken as a chief curator.
Job One: Adding the to the Prehistoric Journey exhibit. Eli acknowledged that being chief curator was surprisingly educational.
“I learned how to pronounce ‘ ,’ ” he said. “All these years, I’ve been saying it wrong.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin
Briefly, chief curator
Edged out by a veteran for museum posting, 9-year-old gets to be chief curator for the day
