The important thing is that I kept up my special birthday tradition of gut-wrenching misery.

[hollyslowly]

I think all the other times I thought I was having a quarter life crisis, I was wrong. Or I started having a quarter life crisis at 24, and will continue having one until some as of yet undetermined date. Which is to say, my 28th birthday is Thursday, I will be spending it at a professional conference, and I feel very sad. I might be over-exercising (?) because it is, quite frankly, the only thing that soothes my nutjob anxiety at all, so I'm giving myself a pass on it.

I've had the same job for four years, and while I truly love the fact that I've learned so many different skills and had the opportunity to be successful at the goals set for me, I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. I'm not even sure I want to do this for the rest of the life of my car loan. The problem is that I'm good at lots of things, but I am not passionate about anything. And my birthday is coming up, and I feel like I'm in exactly the same place I was in last year.

I keep thinking, "Well, grad school," but I don't know what discipline I would pursue, which means that would be a pointless waste of time and money. I looked at a job posting for my exact position, but making twice the money in a bigger city, and even though I know I could excel at that position and rake in some $$, the thought of doing the same thing BUT MORE was so disheartening. WHY CAN'T I MAKE A CHOICE ABOUT WHAT I WANT TO DO.

How did you pick your career? Did you feel a calling to do something?

I made mango-banana-Greek yogurt "ice cream," so I have that to look forward to. Man, this is grim.

Comments

[sky-was-green.livejournal.com]

I will accept either or both. And, as you know, am always happy to babble at people under the guise of informing them about stuff I have experienced.

-- It was (or more accurately, it seemed like) an outgrowth of classics. Mostly I knew I didn't want to go to classics grad school, and I thought "here is a way to have a career about learning stuff and also old things and preserving old things that does not involve archaeology or the tenure track."

What you need to know about this is that I was WRONG about the old stuff. If you want a career in old stuff, you want to look into special collections, more than archives, and most preservation-based jobs are a little closer to apprenticeship side of the spectrum than the rest of librarianship is -- it's more about the experience you've got (or can get) with your materials of choice.

It WAS a natural outgrowth of classics education in that I think classicists, by the nature of being willing to devote so much time and energy to learning for learning's sake, are often very passionate about enabling learning and information access in general.

-- I narrowed to places that had an ALA accredited ML(I)S that offered an archives concentration (rather than a straight MLS or a masters in archival science). I got into three of them, felt the vibes, and then went to the cheapest because it was WAY cheaper. (I hated it with a firey passion and wondered for a long time if I should have gone to Denver, but my work!buddy went to Denver and is sad enough about how much money it cost him that I feel like it was the right call.)

-- I super weirdly lucked into my job. I was tired of meaning to move to Boston and not moving to Boston, so I just moved to Boston and decided if that meant I couldn't get a library job so be it. Which meant I was temping with a lot of places that were super confused by my total lack of non-library work experience. But then a corporate library needed a temp library/archival assistant and put a call out for anyone with any library experience or an interest in history. And then I literally just never left. (In theory I could, but in practice I have discovered that I am very spoiled by corporate/special library pay and somewhat typecast in terms of future positions.) So, I ended up a pseudo medical librarian. Which is not where I saw this going, but still well within my personal scope of "I like helping people find the information they need."

-- I'm functionally a solo librarian, so I have three big buckets of work: 1) collection development (making sure all our journal subscriptions are the right ones and work and all that jazz and also sometimes buying books) 2) research and reference (Special librarians do a lot more "Yes I will do that research/analysis for you" than most other librarians will) and 3) Archival work (for digital, company materials with technical value that is long term for digital company materials but not done for long-term preservation).

So, yesterday involved a meeting to look at our archives priorities and potential stats we can pull on usage; a question about how to track use of our publications; trying to figure out how to find historic work we've done with particular partners; an external permissions request to use our stuff; sending out overdue notices; and reading through the latest update on enterprise data management at my company.

-- My big advice re: considering library school is to go after all the non-degreed level positions first. It will give you a sense of which sort of library you'd like to be in (and how much experience you need to get the degreed positions, which can vary pretty drastically by type) and give you a big leg up on the "straight out of undergrad; just not ready to go into the real world" yet MLIS-holders. Also because, even if you can afford to take an entry-level position post-MLIS, most libraries will not hire you for the entry level positions with the library degree.

Also, depending on what sort of library you end up in a non-degreed position, they may be willing to help fund your degree. (I think it's fairly rare these days, but probably less so in academic libraries where the school has a library program.)

That's my babble! Happy to babble more (here or via email which is just firstname@lastname.com)

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

This is EXCELLENT babble. Expanding access to information and research are both things that I am good at and care about. When you say medical librarian, does that translate to most of the research/analysis you do being related to the medical/healthcare fields?

How do I find non-degreed level positions? Is this as simple as googling "library jobs + non-degreed"? Spoiler alert, I may have done something very similar to that about twenty minutes ago.

[sky-was-green.livejournal.com]

It does. I'm at public health NGO, so the scope is a bit wider than it would otherwise be (if I were a "true" medical librarian at a hospital/med school). The newsletters I put together regularly are generally focused on things like HIV and Reproductive Health, but I do a lot with implementation research and management/governance resources, too.

They're generally not listed as non-degreed, but try assistant, clerk, or para-professional. Pages and shelvers are also non-degreed but also generally not full-time. (The non-degreed part is an absence of requiring the MLIS rather than spelled out explicitly).

Often, your local library association will have a job aggregator a la http://mblc.state.ma.us/jobs/find_jobs/ (PS consider joining the great classics contingent in Boston) local universities or library systems will have their own pages, too, if you've got specific targets in mind.

Archives stuff tends not to have such obvious patterns in keywords but turns up in most of the same places -- the universities up here have some great entry level archives stuff, but it's not always clear from the title what level of education/experience they're looking for.