Last Friday was the DC Library Association’s annual awards banquet. It was also my biggest red letter day ever: I woke up excited about spending the evening with local librarians, and then I got two more pieces of awesome news.
First, I got a wonderful job offer from the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System. I’ll be joining them in a newly created “Data Analyst” role on July 14th. This position is funded indefinitely, and is one that any new library school graduate would be thrilled about. The fact that I still have 2 semesters left in my program makes it even more exciting. I had a feeling my career would include some kind of statistics and analytics, but I certainly did not expect to be working at such a high, strategic level for a major public library system before graduating from library school.
I want to be clear that this is not a paraprofessional position: I’m not going to be a librarian, but this is a professional position within the library’s administrative staff, and I’m pretty sure that my MLS coursework really helped my candidacy. A year of library science education at Catholic has given me a theoretical grounding in the history of the trends and forces that are shaping libraries and the overall profession right now, and I have a robust network of established and new professionals to draw on. My education prepared me for a job interview and helped me refresh skills I hadn’t used in awhile.
Even before this job offer, I was feeling pretty bullish about my decision to go to library school: I’ve had lots of great PAID internships focusing on archival digitization initiatives, which has been fantastic, and I saw a future there – lots of great fellowships for new MLS grads, lots of exciting techy stuff going on in archives. It’s funny to have two paths you’re basically equally excited about, and I am pretty invested in some of the projects I’ve worked on, especially at the DC Department of Transportation. I definitely saw a future in archives (even if that future probably included some term positions). But, in the end, I realized that this is the second time I’ve found a brand-new position in evaluation/visitor services in a cultural institution that seemed custom-made for me. As my professor David Shumaker advised, “you have to go where life takes you.”
Oh, and I got an email a few hours after the job offer telling me that a paper I proposed about my internship at DDOT has been accepted at the MARAC conference this October. So that’s a nice bookend to my time in archives.
Next, I’m going to see whether my new boss will let me apply to ALA’s Emerging Leaders program and re-examine which classes I’m taking this fall.