Narratives of Academic Librarians: Chapter 2: Winning Second Place

Chapter 2: Winning Second Place

I had enough money saved up to do my library science degree.

Basically, I had one-year worth of rent and health insurance, which was terrible health insurance, it basically didn't pay for anything anyway. 

That was it. 

So, I was getting really nervous. I sent out 40 or 50 applications for jobs.

Of course, back then, it was like two of those jobs, you could email your materials, everybody else wanted paper copies. 

I sent out 40 or 50 applications.

I managed to get one interview at [Academic Institution A], in part, because the chair of the search committee knew the previous academic library that I interned at. 

The academic library leader there knew the search chair and wrote one of my letters of reference and that was enough to get me an interview, fortunately.

I came in and interviewed. 

Then just before I finished my master's, I got a phone call from the chair of the search committee.

“Are you still interested in the job?”

 I said, “Yeah.”

 They said, “Well, great news, we offered the job to somebody else and after thinking about it, they turned it down. So, you were the second pick. But you got the job if you want it.”

It's kind of insulting because I thought,” how do you tell somebody that's how they got the job.” As I came to learn they were actually very nice. They were just very, you know, not very filtered. 

I took the job at [Academic Institution A], and that was my first faculty librarian position. It was short and temporary, and a couple of interesting things happened in that position. 

One of them was- I knew it was temporary, and it was temporary for a permanent position as a XXXXX librarian, which I did not have a ton of experience with. 

I did my best to make myself indispensable while I was there. 

It finally came down for the permanent position, and it finally came down to me versus one other person. I was told after the fact, off the record, that I had the better interview and the best presentation. However, the other person had more experience, and they beat me by how they scored. 

In order to keep the integrity of their search, they had to hire the other person, which was pretty devastating for me.

So that's the very quick version of my time there.

Now other things that happened there that kind of informed where I am today.

In my first semester, the search chair for the temp position and for the permanent position was a person named [Jane Doe].

And [Jane] became kind of a mentor for me. My first semester, she had an advanced graduate degree and by far and away was the best published librarian in that department.

Probably the strongest researcher, really nice. 

My first semester, she said, Hey, I'm working on a book. Would you be willing to, she said, I saw you have some experience with just past positions, my graduate assistantship, she's like, “would you be interested in helping on this publication”

“Sure, that sounds great.”

So, I did that. 

Afterwards, she said, “you did a fantastic job.” And we were talking. 

Her advanced degree and my undergraduate degree were in the same field.

One of the things that I lamented when I got there was how my library science program had no instruction on how to teach, and when I started my program, I really intended on just doing reference. 

I had such a bad experience teaching that I thought, I don't want to have to do that.

Then I very quickly learned that that's not really an option.

If you want to be an academic librarian, unless you're doing cataloging, you're teaching. 

So, in a conversation with her, I said, “if it wouldn't have been for my bachelor's degree, I don't even know where I would get started.”

And she said, “yeah, it's kind of interesting about how that works.” 

Then in that conversation, we got the idea to do another publication focused on librarians. And that actually led to other publications. 

And at one time, it was a popular publication.

Because of our conversations with that, and as I was becoming aware that I needed a second masters, if I wanted to stay in the field, I became aware of the field of instructional technology. 

Some of the people at our academic institution were instructional technologists, so I talked to them about what program they went to.

So, I started in summer, and by the end of the year I was enrolled in an instructional technology program. 

When I lost my job, of course, I had taken those classes, but that was the beginning of my path down, if you want to call a blended librarianship, whatever you want to call it in that beginning.

That phase was where it really started. 

And that would probably be about the end of that chapter.