Household Opera

Career guidance from science-fiction TV shows

Not long ago I came up with a career-inclinations quiz question, a way of identifying what one wants to do. Imagine that you and a bunch of other people, from various walks of life, are stranded on an island* — or, if you prefer, sent off to start a colony on an uninhabited planet.** Assume that climate conditions aren't too harsh, that food and fresh water aren't hard to find, that you can do the basic survival things (fire-building, first aid, and so on), and that you all have different skills and areas of expertise. Assume you're staying there for the rest of your lives, and starting a civilization from scratch. Here's the question: what could you contribute to the new society that you're building on the island/planet? And what kinds of work would you be drawn to?

I came up with the question because it occurred to me during one of those idle "what if I were stranded on a desert island?" trains of thought that, while my farming and construction and hunting-gathering skills are minimal, I'd probably gravitate automatically to the intellectual and cultural side of things (assuming there were enough other people on the island to allow some specialization). And one of the first things I'd start thinking about would be sharing and preserving my fellow inhabitants' knowledge. I'd want to make sure that the useful information in people's heads (like medicine, or architecture, or history, or the art of conflict resolution, or how to build a loom and weave cloth on it, or whatever) wouldn't die with them. I'd want to figure out a way to capture some of what they knew, and pass it on.

In the process, I'd have to figure out a medium for all this information (clay tablets? plant-fiber paper? animal skins?). I'd probably spend a lot of time talking with whoever was inventing an educational system. And when I wasn't doing that, I'd write. I'd collect stories, and learn to tell them, and write them down (which is really just another way of making sure knowledge doesn't die out — as every poet since Horace has said at some point or other).

At which point I thought, "Hot damn, I really am a librarian." Not that I didn't know it already, but extra confirmation of one's choice of professions is always a good thing.

So, Reader, what would you do on the Island (or Planet) of New Beginnings?

* This train of thought probably owes something to the return of Lost to the airwaves this week.

** Like the terraformed planets and moons on Firefly — only hopefully a lot more habitable.

Job-hunting and New Year's resolutions

In a little over six months, cross fingers and knock on wood, I'll be finished library school and have another master's degree to my name. And, since the average job search takes about six months, I'm kicking off my post-MSLIS job search in earnest with the new year. I've put together an online portfolio, I'll be asking for resume advice and doing a bit of networking at ALA Midwinter (good thing it's in Philly this year; no travel or hotel reservations required), and I'm armed with an ever-growing list of areas where I have library work experience. So far I'm cautiously optimistic, as far as I can be without triggering superstitious fears of jinxing the process.

Wherever I end up for my next job, I want it to be somewhere where I can stay for a while. Ever since I decided on librarianship as my career path, I've been planning out my life in one- or two-year increments: a year at UVa that became two years, then a year at Swarthmore that became two. It's been a very good three and a half years in terms of gaining experience and meeting people and getting to know my new profession from the inside. But it's also meant that I haven't felt like making any long-range plans that would require my being in the same place for longer than a year or two. Which is an odd disconnected feeling, and I sometimes worry it's becoming a habit.

So my New Year's resolution (or one of them, anyway) is to start breaking out of the habit of thinking "but I won't be around long enough for that," and to start thinking of ways I'd like to settle, once the future becomes a little clearer.

Small quandary

I've been assembling an online portfolio, partly for demonstration purposes (for a talk I'll be giving) and partly for future job-hunting. I've got links or citations to a bunch of writing, formal and informal, library-oriented and literature-oriented. I've been thinking of sending potential portfolio-readers to a handful of posts here, particularly the series I did on academic research, plus some of the ones on mapping and information-seeking.

But my instincts (and various people's advice on professional portfolios) are telling me not to link to what is, after all, a personal and highly miscellaneous blog on my "professional identity" site. Not that I don't expect potential employers to find their way here when they Google me, but a direct link seems a bit much.

Nonetheless, I still want to repackage those posts somehow. So, the quandary: would it be too weird to just repost them on my non-blog site, remove the original blog context, and call them mini-essays? What do you think?

My big news

As you may have surmised from the hypothetical location question I posted recently, I'm moving. And now that plans for the move are officially underway, I'll spill the beans. I've decided to go for my master's in library and information science, and I'll be starting as a new MLIS student at Drexel University in the fall. So I'll be moving to Philadelphia at the end of the summer, assuming that all goes well, I can find an apartment, and my stuff doesn't get lost in transit. (You know, the standard moving worries. Having gone through the process within recent memory, though, I'm a lot less nervous about it than I could have been.)

Two years ago, if you'd asked me whether I wanted to add another set of letters after the end of my name, I'd probably have looked at you with a squirrely expression and said "Er..." I was gun-shy about further education at that point, and I wasn't sure I'd want to keep on the path I'd started on. Two years later, I've had a chance to confirm that yes, I do want to be a librarian when I grow up, and that compared to the six-year-long Ph.D. haul, a master's degree program of a year or a little over a year looks eminently doable. I've had enough time to decompress that I'm actually aflutter with anticipation: I get to go off and learn new things! Whee!

Working at UVa has been fantastic in terms of getting my foot in the door and getting to work with a lot of really fabulous people in the process. I'll miss them all. (Including the ones who are reading this. Hi, all of you! I promise to send postcards!) I'll miss Charlottesville, too, especially the glimpses of the mountains that you see everywhere you go, and the Downtown Mall, and the architecture. But the prospect of living in a big city again is making me all gleeful. I'm already deep into thinking about neighborhoods to live in, navigating SEPTA, finding part-time work, and squeezing in the occasional flying trip to New York on the Chinatown bus.

So: Starting in September, I'll be chronicling a whole new set of adventures. Wish me luck along the way!

Back to the drawing board

I didn't get the job after all. Rejections are never fun. Though I will say that the search committee was admirably fast about getting back to me, and I wish all search committees behaved with as much courtesy and consideration toward the candidates they don't choose, because a prompt rejection is so much better than a "left hanging indefinitely" rejection.

Right. Back to the drawing board, then.

Announcement

I have a job interview in two weeks! Very, very excited. I can't reveal the details, but it's for a job I'd be very happy to have, and I think it's rather a good sign that the job talk topic coincides almost perfectly with a topic I've been mulling in my head for months.

I'm off to D.C. tomorrow to update my interview wardrobe and, if the shopping part of the day goes quickly enough, to see if I can spot some cherry blossoms and have tea at Teaism. And to reconnoiter the area around Kennedy Center so that my friend R. and I can better plot a potential operagoing trip later in the spring.

Back to the posts about the travails of research next week, if I can spare a moment.

If only...

Now if only I had specialized in the Romantic period rather than the early modern, and if only I had major work experience in special collections, I would be all over this job in a heartbeat. I'm not a match for it, but still: curating a Shelley collection! At the New York Public Library! How fabulous would that be?

Greetings from an undisclosed location

I've arrived at the hotel where I'll be staying for tomorrow's job interview at Further School (as opposed to Nearer School, where I interview next week). I don't want to say more about where I currently am, since the details of job searches are sensitive information, but I will say that the weather's absolutely beautiful, and there is an excitingly unfamiliar view from my hotel room. Also, I spent the airplane flight reading an interesting mix of articles and thinking unusually coherent thoughts about technology and information overload. (Unusually, because flying generally makes me feel wooly-brained even when I haven't gotten up before dawn and then dosed myself with Dramamine.) I may post some of the resulting thoughts later on, when I get back to Charlottesville.

So: greetings from my secret undisclosed location, and now I must return to practicing my job talk for tomorrow morning. Anon, anon.

Real life gets suddenly busy

I have two job interviews in two states a couple of time zones apart, both coming up in the next two weeks. It's amazing how news of this kind arrives in multiples. I'd be wondering why my (metaphorical) stock mysteriously went up overnight, except I know that the logical explanation is that I've been sending out job applications in bunches and getting replies in bunches. (I got two skinny envelopes in the mail within a few days of each other recently, too. But one of them I'd been expecting and the other was perhaps the nicest rejection letter I've ever received, so even though I'd really wanted the job, it didn't sting as much as it could have.)

To-do list: finish prepping job talk for interview #1, plan presentation for interview #2,  reflect on where I want to be in five years, and remember to take deep breaths.

(Addendum: Why oh why, during the season in which I most needed a lightweight interview suit, did the Mysterious Cabal of Fashion Trendsetters decree that the big thing for spring would be "Everybody in Seersucker"?)

Circuit overload

Brief summary of what's in my head right now: Major decisions to be made, and soon. Mild panic over timing. General sense of life shifting on its axis. (I don't want to go into more detail until the decisions are made, so that's all I'm going to say at present, except that it's good rather than bad — the panic factor is mostly because I thought I'd have more time to reflect.) Expect either sporadic blogging or manic babbling as a result. Probably the former, because I'm feeling a tad overwhelmed, and some unplugged time is in order. For now, talk amongst yourselves!

[Edit: Decisions and accompanying panic have been temporarily deferred. We now return to your regularly scheduled blog.]