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December not-really-posting-much meme: Why I chose to go to library school
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riverlight asked me to write about why I chose to go to library school, and I remember that process pretty distinctly, so I'm happy to natter on about it a bit.
I actually decided twice: once in my fresman year of college, and then again during the couple of years I took off between undergrad and actually going to grad school.
The first time I decided to go to library school, I was an 18-year-old freshman working my very first library job in the stacks office of the biggest library on campus, which meant I shelved books. About half the people doing my job were other students, but the other half were full-time staffers, and that was really my first contact with people who actually worked in libraries as a full-time job. (I mean, I suppose in retrospect that someone at my small town's small public library must have been working there for pay, possibly full time, but that concept never really registered when I was a kid.)
I had come to college intending to double major in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Linguistics and then pursue a PhD in whichever one seemed more interesting at the end of four years, but by the second half of freshman year that was starting to seem like a really daunting prospect. The Medieval and Renaissance Studies department was tiny, and my social anxiety militated against actually getting a lot of personal attention from anyone at my great big school, so I switched to History. I also wasn't very good at learning languages, which I was beginning to realize could be an obstacle to getting anywhere in either Linguistics or History. Not insurmountable, but an obstacle nonetheless. I also remember being deeply terrified of the prospect of writing what amounted to a novel's worth of original work in a dissertation, which, in retrospect, is sort of hilarious, but that freaked me out at the time.
On the other hand, I really liked working in the library. I liked the library itself, and I liked helping people. I could work in a library forever, I was realizing. That was an option. And I could move slightly further up the ladder than my adult staff co-workers by becoming a Librarian, which entailed getting a master's degree. But a master's degree seemed like a piece of cake compared to my original PhD ambitions, and it didn't require me to be training for anything in particular in undergrad; I just needed to get a BA and continue working in libraries, and I'd be set. So that's what I decided to do.
I followed through on that plan to the point of applying to graduate school during my senior year of college, and getting accepted. But I was pretty burned out on school by then--I'd gotten properly into fandom in March of my senior year, which tanked my ability to actually focus on school and led to me getting a C- in my fluff science credit Intro to Weather class--and not quite ready to up and move to another state, so I deferred admission for a year. I was still sure that library school was the plan, but I wasn't ready to get to it right away.
After a brief stint working overnights at Office Max, stocking shelves and putting price tags on batteries, I got a full-time staff job in my university's library system. It paid juuuust enough for me to live on and gave me some more time working in a library, and I was pretty content there apart from, you know, hating my boss and wanting to do more question-answering and less tedious materials processing. Question-answering was a privilege reserved for people with master's degrees, unless the question was "where is this specific thing you're processing?" or "where is the bathroom?"
At some point, doing this job and being in fandom, including a brief pass through Man from UNCLE fandom, I ran across the fact that Robert Vaughn (who played Napoleon Solo) had pursued a PhD in History during his acting career, producing a dissertation on Hollywood blacklisting. My university's library system had a copy, shelved in the building where I worked, and I remember going downstairs and getting it off the shelf and bringing it back to my desk to hold in my hands. I just kind of stared at it, fascinated by the idea of producing something like this. I had a lot of half-formed thoughts about American social history--about whether the American celebrity class functioned as a kind of latter day aristocracy and whether it was developing the features of a genuine distinct class in whatever technical sense, which is a question I still find interesting--and it occurred to me that I could go to grad school and actually research this and write about it and make a career out of that. I was probably already in the process of writing Hawks and Hands, and the sheer size of a dissertation as a piece of writing no longer intimidated me much; it seemed like a fascinating challenge.
Of course, my undergraduate education had been somewhat lacksadaisical--I hadn't focused much, and certainly hadn't focused on American history or social processes or political science or everything else I would need to learn to even begin to study history at a graduate level. I also knew that grad school in History would require foreign language competencies I didn't have--I'd barely scraped through Latin and a Linguistics minor.
So if I wanted to do a PhD, which right then I actually really did, I would have to do a second Bachelor's or at least a post-bacc to get up to speed (and also cultivate some professors who would recommend me and so on), and then get into grad school. And then, I knew, I would be In Academia. My oldest brother had just done the better part of a year toward a PhD in Russian Studies, and he hated it enough to be deeply relieved to be called up to active service with the Marines and sent to Iraq. Even if I liked it better than he had, working in a university library meant I was reasonably familiar with the pressures of getting and keeping a faculty job--I was definitely aware that I would be in the position of having to move wherever the job in my field was. Which meant I would spend, with a second undergraduate degree and then a graduate degree, something like the next eight or ten years going to school for the very uncertain outcome of some faculty job somewhere. Hopefully.
But it would have been really cool.
So I considered all of that, and I considered the amount of time I was spending right then on being in fandom and writing a lot of fanfic, and my nebulous ambition to also write original stuff, and I suspected that I could maybe do one or the other of those and academia, but not both. I remember very distinctly sitting at my desk at the library and considering my options. I could have this really challenging, involving career, or I could do a relatively simple master's degree which would lead to a 9-5 job--a job I could do more or less anywhere--and have time for whatever kind of writing I wanted to do, and carrying on my geeky internet-based social life, and...
And so I decided once again to go to library school.
(I mean, also librarians make better money than non-librarian staffers in a library and get to answer more interesting questions; "do nothing" was an option in there, but I thought making more money and doing the big job would be nice. If I'd thought that all the way through I would have done it in a less expensive way, which would have meant staying in Michigan, but I wanted to have a big grad school relocation adventure, so. That was that part of the decision. *g*)
So, short version, I decided to go to library school because it would be easier than getting a PhD in history. Although also because I really like working in libraries and thought I would enjoy being a librarian, which I do.
riverlight asked me to write about why I chose to go to library school, and I remember that process pretty distinctly, so I'm happy to natter on about it a bit.I actually decided twice: once in my fresman year of college, and then again during the couple of years I took off between undergrad and actually going to grad school.
The first time I decided to go to library school, I was an 18-year-old freshman working my very first library job in the stacks office of the biggest library on campus, which meant I shelved books. About half the people doing my job were other students, but the other half were full-time staffers, and that was really my first contact with people who actually worked in libraries as a full-time job. (I mean, I suppose in retrospect that someone at my small town's small public library must have been working there for pay, possibly full time, but that concept never really registered when I was a kid.)
I had come to college intending to double major in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Linguistics and then pursue a PhD in whichever one seemed more interesting at the end of four years, but by the second half of freshman year that was starting to seem like a really daunting prospect. The Medieval and Renaissance Studies department was tiny, and my social anxiety militated against actually getting a lot of personal attention from anyone at my great big school, so I switched to History. I also wasn't very good at learning languages, which I was beginning to realize could be an obstacle to getting anywhere in either Linguistics or History. Not insurmountable, but an obstacle nonetheless. I also remember being deeply terrified of the prospect of writing what amounted to a novel's worth of original work in a dissertation, which, in retrospect, is sort of hilarious, but that freaked me out at the time.
On the other hand, I really liked working in the library. I liked the library itself, and I liked helping people. I could work in a library forever, I was realizing. That was an option. And I could move slightly further up the ladder than my adult staff co-workers by becoming a Librarian, which entailed getting a master's degree. But a master's degree seemed like a piece of cake compared to my original PhD ambitions, and it didn't require me to be training for anything in particular in undergrad; I just needed to get a BA and continue working in libraries, and I'd be set. So that's what I decided to do.
I followed through on that plan to the point of applying to graduate school during my senior year of college, and getting accepted. But I was pretty burned out on school by then--I'd gotten properly into fandom in March of my senior year, which tanked my ability to actually focus on school and led to me getting a C- in my fluff science credit Intro to Weather class--and not quite ready to up and move to another state, so I deferred admission for a year. I was still sure that library school was the plan, but I wasn't ready to get to it right away.
After a brief stint working overnights at Office Max, stocking shelves and putting price tags on batteries, I got a full-time staff job in my university's library system. It paid juuuust enough for me to live on and gave me some more time working in a library, and I was pretty content there apart from, you know, hating my boss and wanting to do more question-answering and less tedious materials processing. Question-answering was a privilege reserved for people with master's degrees, unless the question was "where is this specific thing you're processing?" or "where is the bathroom?"
At some point, doing this job and being in fandom, including a brief pass through Man from UNCLE fandom, I ran across the fact that Robert Vaughn (who played Napoleon Solo) had pursued a PhD in History during his acting career, producing a dissertation on Hollywood blacklisting. My university's library system had a copy, shelved in the building where I worked, and I remember going downstairs and getting it off the shelf and bringing it back to my desk to hold in my hands. I just kind of stared at it, fascinated by the idea of producing something like this. I had a lot of half-formed thoughts about American social history--about whether the American celebrity class functioned as a kind of latter day aristocracy and whether it was developing the features of a genuine distinct class in whatever technical sense, which is a question I still find interesting--and it occurred to me that I could go to grad school and actually research this and write about it and make a career out of that. I was probably already in the process of writing Hawks and Hands, and the sheer size of a dissertation as a piece of writing no longer intimidated me much; it seemed like a fascinating challenge.
Of course, my undergraduate education had been somewhat lacksadaisical--I hadn't focused much, and certainly hadn't focused on American history or social processes or political science or everything else I would need to learn to even begin to study history at a graduate level. I also knew that grad school in History would require foreign language competencies I didn't have--I'd barely scraped through Latin and a Linguistics minor.
So if I wanted to do a PhD, which right then I actually really did, I would have to do a second Bachelor's or at least a post-bacc to get up to speed (and also cultivate some professors who would recommend me and so on), and then get into grad school. And then, I knew, I would be In Academia. My oldest brother had just done the better part of a year toward a PhD in Russian Studies, and he hated it enough to be deeply relieved to be called up to active service with the Marines and sent to Iraq. Even if I liked it better than he had, working in a university library meant I was reasonably familiar with the pressures of getting and keeping a faculty job--I was definitely aware that I would be in the position of having to move wherever the job in my field was. Which meant I would spend, with a second undergraduate degree and then a graduate degree, something like the next eight or ten years going to school for the very uncertain outcome of some faculty job somewhere. Hopefully.
But it would have been really cool.
So I considered all of that, and I considered the amount of time I was spending right then on being in fandom and writing a lot of fanfic, and my nebulous ambition to also write original stuff, and I suspected that I could maybe do one or the other of those and academia, but not both. I remember very distinctly sitting at my desk at the library and considering my options. I could have this really challenging, involving career, or I could do a relatively simple master's degree which would lead to a 9-5 job--a job I could do more or less anywhere--and have time for whatever kind of writing I wanted to do, and carrying on my geeky internet-based social life, and...
And so I decided once again to go to library school.
(I mean, also librarians make better money than non-librarian staffers in a library and get to answer more interesting questions; "do nothing" was an option in there, but I thought making more money and doing the big job would be nice. If I'd thought that all the way through I would have done it in a less expensive way, which would have meant staying in Michigan, but I wanted to have a big grad school relocation adventure, so. That was that part of the decision. *g*)
So, short version, I decided to go to library school because it would be easier than getting a PhD in history. Although also because I really like working in libraries and thought I would enjoy being a librarian, which I do.
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Oddly enough I never worked the circ desk in all my years of student and staff work in libraries! I was always back at a collection desk or in some variety of technical services. After two and a half years opening mail in the basement of a law firm library, I knew I wanted to get back to something that involved interacting with actual library users again as soon as possible. :)
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The last time I went to the branch where I used to work, to do some research for an exhibit I was building (I do freelance museum work now), the clerks didn't even know about the existence of a huge vertical file full of local history ephemera. I had to tell them where it was down in the basement.
Bitter? No, not much. Relieved not to be working there anymore, actually. Something they never talk about in library school is how 90% of the jobs are for big, ugly bureaucracies whose administrators don't care about the needs of their actual patrons. But sad for the public that system serves (for my personal library needs, I drive to the next county over -- they're much better, if still almost impossible to get a job with).
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Thanks for sharing your story!
ETA for clarity
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Ha! I was working at Michigan, and really should have gone to library school there, but relocated to Maryland, which was I think a highly rated school and offered internships at all the cool institutions in the DC area (opportunities I entirely failed to take advantage of, but that was the idea at the start, anyway). Did you wind up going to library school somewhere closer to home?
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I'm doing the MLS at Emporia State in Kansas, which has a program designed for those working full time, and classes that have an online component with weekend intensives (11 hours of class time in two days). Your program, with the opportunities for internship, sounds like it would have been wonderful, however. Other than Michigan, I also considered Madison, WI and Seattle.
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(When I was like, seven, I remember telling my parents that I wanted to be an author (and a mom) when I grew up, and their actual response was "okay but you need a job that makes money, too." So ever since I was a fairly little kid I knew that whatever job I was going to do was just going to be my paying gig to finance what I really wanted to do, which I gather is not the way everyone looks at it. *g*)
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And I was sort of fascinated by the way that Americans will deny that we *have* social classes, and wondering if we were nonetheless developing this at least partially hereditary aristocracy. But I never did the research, so I'm not even sure how to really frame the questions there. :)
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