After being rejected for another job after an interview that both I and the panel agreed was excellent, I feel like when I finally do get a job I will want to say “No Thanks” to those colleges and universities who rejected me for now 43 positions.

Yes, 43. 43 applications, 6 interviews, one stupidly rejected offer. From tenure-track positions at top schools to part time library tech jobs anywhere, I have applied to everything. My catch-22: libraries in urban centres say I need more experience, while those in more remote areas will not even call me for an interview.

I know I didn’t get reference experience during my library degree. That was my first stupid mistake, saying I would be faithful to my old office job by working weekends, thereby messing my schedule for hours I was offered on the reference desk.

So, since no one will give me a job I have to find some kind of way of staying engaged. I have worked on my resume and cover letter until my eyes have watered. The multiple librarians who have reviewed it have said it was excellent, including the chair of the last hiring committee I spoke with.

I want to at least be engaged with ideas and write about things so I can keep my name out there. I feel that without the support of a position and a title people will soon forget about me. And then new graduates will come out of library school and I will have to explain what I have been doing these 6 or 8 months when I compete against them.

My second catch-22: I want to write in order to stay focused on getting a position, but I feel like I cannot write without some professional experience. I am sick of living my life in books, articles, and theories. I want to see what the real issues are. I want to know exactly where my energy needs to be directed. Before I embark on writing and thinking about things I want to identify where the real issues are.

But how do I do that without a job? Catch-22……

But there is also, I believe, a job for a public philosophy to perform: the job that Plato and Aristotle and Seneca tried to perform in their own day. The job, that is, of clarifying thinking on matters of public urgency through one’s own thought and writing. And this is a job that American professors of philosophy perform far too seldom nowadays, and have not performed well since the time of John Dewey and William James…. Nonetheless, part of the blame must also rest with academic philosophy itself, which too often speaks a jargon-laden language and doesn’t learn how to write in a way that would engage a non-specialist.

The first thing that can be said is that the choice between pursuing one’s own work and writing for the general public need not be seen so exclusively and so tragically. For in fact the general public is hungry for philosophical work addressing ethical and political issues — so long as this work is written by someone who sounds like a person. There is little excuse for the horrible quality of writing in philosophical journals. It is lazy and often, even in its air of precision, imprecise. It is perfectly possible to write something intelligible, and even moving, that a college-educated member of the general public can read with interest.

I wasn’t willing, or wasn’t able from the perspective of graduate schools I guess, to do philosophy in this way. And I wasn’t able to ignore works from history, politics, sociology etc which bring important answers to philosophical discussions. Becoming a librarian was not a step backwards from academics. For me it was a step into a world without distinctions between Humanities and Social Sciences, or between disciplines.

They say that one must first become a specialist before becoming a generalist, which is why all the most distinguished thinkers become distinguished in their own area before branching out. But I was not ready for that kind of obsession for 5 or more years to the detriment of all my other reading interests.

A confession: I have had the worst summer in recent memory. It goes back to having a very poor final semester. I hope to write more specifically about my school experience later. I will say that that last semester killed almost all of the excitement I had entering school. Even at the end of the winter semester I felt like I had so much passion and dedication, and my experience basically killed it.

Except for the possibility of employment. I made it through that final semester with the hope that my first position would make it better. I gambled all of my hopes on the fact that if I could only suffer through useless assignments, “lectures” dominated by group presentations, a disappointing practicum, and an administration which could be distant from the reality of students, I would be able to secure a fulfilling position which would allow me to keep learning, to keep doing research and investigation, and really help people with their work and research.

I didn’t expect to have a position right out of school. First thing, my school had no successful work study or co-op, but only a practicum which was about 100 hours of work, so I didn’t expect to be set up with a position. And, I want to be an academic librarian, which means there is less flexibility in hiring.

Now, six months after finishing my last essay, I am having a really difficult time staying motivated, keeping my passion. I remember how I used to just pull books off the shelve–on librarianship, on the history of libraries, on the future of information. All summer I have not really been able to read substantially on a topic.

Admittedly, I had a single job offer. However, I did not have a positive feeling from my communications with the people there, and it was far away, and it would have thrown my household and family into shambles. Nevertheless, I have submitted more than 30 applications and have had only four interviews.

My…depression I guess you could call it, although it is more like a slump… my slump has only deepened as time goes on because I don’t really understand what more I can do. I was in the top 20 percent of my graduating class. I have had my resume reviewed with excellent feedback. I have followed up with selection panels who only have good things to say about my interviews.

And now I have lost my student job at the library, so I am unemployed. So, that has been the general downturn of my entire summer. I have not been writing, or reading, or connecting with other librarians. I expected to be well on my way to preparing a paper for publication, participating with colleagues on projects, and working on some kind of presentation to a conference or professional meeting. How can I do all that when I am now worrying about paying my rent?

I will say one positive thing: I have been invited to participate as a junior professional and a blogger in the Canadian Library Association’s National Summit on Library Human Resources (blog, press release). The meeting over two days next week between senior professionals from every area in librarians as well as executive members of the CLA will address the future of human resources in Canadian libraries. I was nominated for a fully funded trip to Ottawa, which is a great privilege and I am very excited. Please, if you are interested, read the proceedings from me and the other bloggers involved.

Lastly, I have thought seriously about closing this blog. I’ve noticed that the library blog sphere has died lately. Or, at least, I have not read anything in my reader which I feel like I need to comment on. Maybe it is me. Or maybe not. Maybe there is really nothing much said anymore.

However, I think I will keep writing. If only for myself, to get back into having my own thoughts. It has taken me all summer to detox from the horrible experience which was the last semester of school.

I noted that in the last two days I have learned two things which could later help me offer service doing research. The context of the first instance is this book review I have to write for Library Journal on the life of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Now, not being an English major, Hopkins is enough of an outside character in literature that I haven’t heard of him. So I was required to get some books out of the library and read about his life and work so I can evaluating the biography. And another piece of knowledge learned, much of his life story can be explained by the influence of the Oxford Movement, also called the Tractarian Movement. This I had not heard of either. So now I have the beginnings of knowledge and a vocabulary for this area, and can being to speak with readers on this topic.

The second case was the theory that women’s liberation, education, and empowerment contributes to the health of her and her children, and ultimately their IQ, contributing to the Flynn Effect or climbing IQs. This I learned from reading a review of two books on birth control in the New York Review of Books. I had known about the Flynn Effect, but now I know it has a name.

In an interview last week, I had a little bit of an intimate moment, where I told an anecdote about how when I was young I used to read the encyclopedia almost exclusively. To go into more depth here, I remember that I would read volumes and articles out of order, without any systematic approach. But over the years in my parents house I must have read all of the articles which were interesting to me. I can remember enjoying history, politics and war, anthropology and archaeology, linguistics and particularly historical language development. I don’t know if I read about philosophy as it is practiced by the academicians, but I do remember reading about Justice, Freedom, Democracy and other articles of that kind.

Preparing for the interview, thinking about my passion, that memory strongly affected me. I kind of felt at peace with where I was going and what I was spending my intellectual effort on. The more of the most important works in each area I can read, the better I will be able to serve. What kind of special gift is that, on top of everything else?

In retrospect I felt like I said a lot, and was able to put forward my philosophy of service and professional practice. They asked me about 10 or 12 questions–after that I was so worried, because we had scheduled 45 mins and it had only been about 25 or 30. But, I had a lot of questions and we talked a bit about them, so I actually think we went about 5 minutes over time.

I have this particular philosophy of teaching, and of reference service, and although I know I have certain beliefs, it is exciting to actually express them in words. One of the best questions in the interview was “Name a book which has changed your outlook in the last year” or something. I named Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is such a wonderful book, and it has change my outlook and my general interactions with students.

I am really looking forward to just getting out there and helping people, being active, working on projects. Let’s just hope this comes through in the next week and I can talk about how excited I am about this position.

How do you know it is the end of the semester? Inbox is empty….

It hit my about half way through this semester: I have stopped caring about being in school. I am exhausted by the number of minor time-filling assignments, and I really want to get out to work and just start helping people.

If there is only one thing I did learn, it is how to find enough sources to actually teach yourself about an area, and to do so under time constraints. All of the insights I have had about this career, and all the things I am passionately interested in mostly come from reading on my own, beyond the readings for class. Except maybe for Information Literacy, which was a random class which changed my thoughts about librarianship and education.

I just have to continually tell myself there is less than a month left, and then I can take a long break. But I really do miss reading my own books and developing my own thoughts. My thoughts are going off in new directions, but the rest of my body is stuck coming to class every day.

However, I can’t do it anymore. I feel lost. I have all of these readings which I can’t keep track of. I read half way though one reading, find an interesting reference, and because I am already on the computer I do a quick Google Scholar search for the paper, leaving me all turned around from where I was. I am trying to take notes, but it just isn’t as convenient to me as having the articles right there to consult.

Plus, I have to start writing tomorrow, and I am already anxious about the prospects. Flipping back and forth between the reader and my LaTeX processor seems like a nightmare. If you don’t know how I work (maybe I’ll take a picture next time), let’s say it looks like an printing press exploded. I like to make piles of materials on the floor, with each pile standing for a different part of my argument, so I know exactly where to turn to. When I am done with a paper I place it in a final pile so it doesn’t get in the way again: this way I know I have cited everything I wanted to.

The thing is, I am a digital native. I have this blog, a Flickr account and I use Facebook. I have been chatting and writing online since I was 13 or so. However, I think that the process of reading and writing for the university is so tied up with the medium of print that, for me at least, I have to work in a print world to be continually successful at it.

So, I figure I can just suck it up, buy an extra stack of paper, and print them when I get home. Actually, the prospect is exciting me. Perhaps I can reward myself with a filing cabinet, now that I am writing things that actually interest me and that I will want to keep.

After absolutely falling in love with Information Literacy after taking the class last semester, I approached a librarian at another campus who teaches a credit course in IL (which is a big deal for the conservative University of Toronto).

Opposed to working there directly, she proposed a research project based on the assessment of her students in the course. Working with the TA of the course, the three of us are publishing a paper examining the old tests and assignments, trying to understand why, after a semester of study, students continually fail to understand Boolean searching, and constructing search statements.

I am completing the literature review and a part of the content analysis coding. Of all my work this semester, this may be my most time consuming, contributing to the probably the three busiest months in my life.

However, it will also most likely be the greatest learning opportunity I will have had in these last two years. I feel really confident when I say to prospective libraries that I have detailed empirical knowledge with the IL needs of todays undergraduates. Plus, to be academically published, can’t complain about that.

However, there have been a lot of positive developments in my career over the last few months, and I hope to deal with them in the next few posts.

First of all, I have submitted myself to some book review editors, and I currently have two books I am reading for two different journals. The first is an academic examination of blogs and the blog sphere for The Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship. The second is a collection of unpublished writings by Kurt Vonnegut for Library Journal. The second is only the standard 200 word review, but the first is a substantial one thousand words.

I really should have tried to finish the longer one over Christmas, because now it is getting in the way of school work, but I have decided to work a few hours less this semester to fit in writing, school work and applying for jobs.

It is great to finally have a change to publish my writing. And, hopefully, I will have a peer-reviewed paper to add to them, which I will talk about in my next post.

I felt off today, having difficulty adjusting to the fact that I have nothing to do. I took myself out for a coffee, something I haven’t had the chance to do in months. I spent $40 at a used bookstore on the new unabridged translation of Foucault’s History of Madness and a replacement copy of Society of the Spectacle which I accidentally wrecked a few months ago. I strolled around in the snow, wrote in my book, and was generally quiet all day.

This is really one of the few times I have had the opportunity to be alone in the last four months. I have been stuck inside working on assignments, while my partner has been attempting a transition of careers into not-for-profit urban agriculture work. She has been working for a variety of organizations, helping out until she can find something full-time, and because of this she is always around and I never get a second to just stop and be quiet with myself for a moment.

Of course, when it comes, I feel useless. No essays, no group work, no pointless professional busy work. I have difficulty reading for myself because I am out of practice. I do have a book review to complete for the Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship (my first!), but more on future developments in another post.

I want to rest, but I feel like I have forgotten how to just let go. But when I finally do let go I will have lost this momentum and will have to struggle to get it back next semester. This is why I am out of sorts.

Just picked my courses:

FIS2127H - Collection, Development, Evaluation and Management FIS2172H - Readers’ Advisory:Reference Work and Resource FIS2300H - Special Topics: Information Literacy FIS2199H - Special Topics in Info. Studies: Advocacy and Library Issues (no direct link, at bottom)

This last one is by distance–my first distance class–and I heard is amazing. It is with the ex-President of the Canadian Library Association, who gave a talk last year. I am also very excited by Information Literacy and Collection Development…. and even Readers’ Advisory, even though I am not really interested in public library work.

Next semester:

FIS2131H - The Literature of the Humanities and Social Sciences FIS2181H - Information Policy

These two I want for sure. Not so sure about:

FIS2137H - International Organizations: Their Documents and Publications FIS2132H - The Literature of Science and Technology or FIS2125H - Information and Culture in a Global Context (links on this page are really broken)

I have signed up for Science and Technology for now, but I don’t know if I am more interested in professional courses or theory courses this time around. And, frankly, the selection this year was not very fruitful.

Things have been somewhat up in the air since I left school. A professor wants me to publish a paper, but I cannot get the motivation to go over it and improve it (I guess it doesn’t help that I am not totally interested in the topic.) First I was doing a thesis, then not doing a thesis, then doing a thesis. Then not. The professor I wished to supervise recommended that this is most likely not the best school to study what I want to study.

And I watched all three seasons of Lost. Most likely not the best for productivity.

So, my current plans are as follows. Forgo doing the thesis right now, because if I were to continue towards a PhD, I have been informed that it is not entirely detrimental to not have done one. However, I will spend the next year attempting to be published. And since my interests are lying along lines not of my department, this will entail giving myself a reading class and writing a paper on my own time.

Professionally, I have decided to end school for now after I graduate next year. I cannot think of applying to PhD programs for December, because my interests have changed so much over the last year, it is possible I wouldn’t continue in Information Studies. Regardless, I want to get that second masters, and working in the library first at a University will make this easier. And after getting settled, I can go from there.

So, after about three weeks of not having a concrete plan, I have one. Now that the abyss of anxiety is over I can get back to work.

However, I only mention it because I wanted everyone to take a look at the FISSC website, which in my opinion is the best student council website I have ever seen. It was designed last year by our incoming President Christina Hwang.