Over lunch with a Columbia colleague, Karen Green, we discussed how our previous, non-library work prepared us for librarianship. For her it was bartending, for me mostly theater electrics and production management.
While I think there are some really great young librarians who went straight from college to library school, I think having post-college real life and even those random jobs you have in your twenties is extremely valuable for our work.
I've also been known to tell friends in their twenties not to worry so much about their careers and to spend time writing poems, hopping trains, doing jobs that have greater social than career benefits, and just generally trying things on. Of course this only works for those not dependent on health insurance. I also acknowledge that this theory probably comes from a position of privilege. While I didn't get any help from my parents (other than $300 I borrowed and quickly repaid for my first apartment's security deposit), I knew I would never be truly poor or homeless.
Anyway, following is a rundown of some jobs I've had and what benefit, if any, they had on my library work. They are chronological to the best of my memory.
library page
I only worked at the Mt. Kisco public library for a few months because the work bored me to death.
ice cream scooper (high school and then one summer in college)
In high school I mostly learned how to push the clock hands forward so I could close up earlier, and all manners of customer disservice. Somehow I also dug up the labor laws pertaining to lunches and breaks and posted them on the bulletin board. I have no idea how I found them in my pre-Internet days!
cashier, supermarkets
I had my first experience of the consequences of excessively generous customer service (i.e. getting fired after trying to sell beer to my underage friends), but I didn't entirely learn this lesson, as I still tend to want to do as much as I can for the patron, sometimes perhaps more than is appropriate (e.g. letting them photocopy rare or fragile zines)
campus copy shop
I wish I'd learned more at this job, as it would have helped me with both librarianship and zine making. I touched my first computers here, both Macs and PCs and got a small taste of desk top publishing. This was the late 1980s.
mall food court
I learned good techniques for chopping tomatoes and onions. I think this was the first time I worked closely with a black person (The manager was Jamaican.), which was important for me as a person, as well as a future librarian. I also think that everyone should have to do food service at some point in their life, just to see what it's like on the other side of the counter.
NYPIRG canvas office manager
I was pretty sucky at canvassing (going door to door in the Albany suburbs asking for money for NYPIRG's environmental and other programs), but I learned a little about making persuasive arguments and organizing my thoughts. It was also my first time living away from home and college. I learned about Progresso Lentil Soup.
bookstore clerk
Spring Street Books, The Drama Bookshop, and Wendell's. I learned book trade stuff at these jobs, like selection and reader's advisory, and also picked up intense expertise in theater books and plays. The software they used for inventory and ordering was also good for me to get familiar with in the early 90s. At Wendell's is where I got my first taste of managing other people, and I didn't like it any more then than I do now.
poet, dancer, puppeteer
Not that I was paid for any of these things. These were times in my life where I was unstructured, had a chance to explore who I was and what I wanted to be. I freelanced as an electrician or collected unemployment. I was friends with other artist types and went to spoken word events and off-off Broadway shows. Surely there are tangible benefits to my librarianship of having lived this life, but mostly I think it was important to me developmentally.
stage manager
Stage management is for Type A/control freak personalities. You have to know and manage everything. You have to deal with egomaniac assholes. You learn (and teach) the value of saying please and thank you. The work ethic is unparalleled.
theater director
This is another job where you are responsible for everything. The actors, designers, crew, etc. sit there looking at you until you tell them the plan. Here I learned more about dealing with different personalities (including my own). I learned how to look at the big picture, to be the vision person, and to let someone else, like the stage manager, deal with the details. This was also important to me in getting to know my own mind, imagination, and authority. I wasn't interested in being the boss, but I did feel responsible to my vision for the piece, and therefore I had to say no to people sometimes when their ideas clashed with mine. I had to express myself to people with different learning styles and orientations--talk visually to a designer, justify my crazy idea to a technical director, etc.
theater electrician
Troubleshooting! Is it plugged in? Is it turned on? Righty, tighty; lefty, loosy. Working with a crew, valuing labor. Identifying the best tactic for dealing with a knotty issue (e.g. cable from the circuits, vs. from the instruments). I also got to see some of the world as an electrician. I got a job one summer at a theater in Germany, where I was exposed to theater folk from all over Europe. Another summer I toured Brazil with a dance company. Travel--probably good experience for any profession. Would I have ever done these things if I'd gone straight from college to grad school? No way!
production manager
This is like stage managing, but with even more and bigger assholes. I had to run meetings attended by egotistical Tony Award winners, and later with egotistical 20 something dot commers. I learned how to anticipate problems--that is see difficulties before they existed. Working at the dot com, although I wasn't super involved in the computer tech part of it (I was running the tv studio), exposed me to new media technologies, including video streaming. Useful!
Since I'm running out the door soon to see a dance piece in which a friend in her 20s is performing, I'm going to skip some of the less relevant, and also more relevant (i.e. library) jobs and sign off here.
Btw I chose to explore this on my blog, rather than on my zine (though I may reprint it there) because I thought it would be interesting to see what others have to say on the topic, in a public forum. So please comment or otherwise share your experience.
PS In case anyone cares why I haven't posted in a while, it's just because I've been consumed with other projects, including writing reference and zines annual reports.
Comments
lia (not verified)
Sat, 06/14/2008 - 11:38am
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Jenna this is so
Jenna this is so interesting, mainly because I DID put those things on my resume, and I think it's what got me hired in my present position. Since I took a long time before I became a librarian, I worked a lot of jobs in the meantime, and learned so much that lends itself to my job now.
I put my job doing PR for bands on my resume, and bookstore and recordstore work (which I did for almost ten years. Two library jobs that I got while I was still in school-- at the New Yorker Library and at the Pratt Library-- I know for a fact that I got because both of my future bosses were impressed that I had worked with Sleater Kinney. Who knew?
Probably the best preparation for being a librarian came from working at a food co-op. The Olympia Co-op, at the time I worked there was one of the largest consensus run collectives of it's kind. 50+ people making huge decisions using true consensus. It was insane but awesome and somehow worked and thrived. It taught me when to stand up for something that I really thought was important, but also taught me how to quickly assess that I would be okay if I didn't get my way on something I didn't care very much about. I can't tell you how much of that I don't see in our profession--I wish everyone could get a taste of that. The other thing working at the co-op taught me is THAT WORK IS NOT LIFE. So many people I worked with there were defined by what they did at the store, they never stopped being that person. Although I am proud to be a librarian, and it does shape some of what I do in the world outside my work, I also try as hard as I can to leave my job in the building and not let it be my life. I am looking forward to what other comments come in on this!
Emily (not verified)
Sat, 06/14/2008 - 2:24pm
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Great question! I hope the
Great question! I hope the planet chimes in!
I think my time working at Out magazine got me placed at the 'gay branch' on 10th street of NYPL as a trainee, and that was one of the best years of my working life. I loved Frank, still the best manager I've ever had.
I worked at lots of other magazines before going to library school--other than temping, that's all I did after college. (Pre- and during college was your regular assortment of fast food, work study, and odd jobs--I was crew member of the month at the Lincoln City, OR, McDonalds back in August 1988. I put that on my resume for probably too long.) I eventually broke down and applied to library school after a year of working on the launch of Lucky magazine, "a new magazine about shopping!", a venture I never imagined would take off. I mean, who would pay for a catalog? It turned out to revolutionize the consumer magazine industry. Every time you see the price and website for an item right next to it on the page of a magazine for smoothest, easiest transformation of fleeting desire into consumer good and concomitant consumer debt? That's the legacy of Lucky. The stakes always felt so high--I once misprinted the phone number for Saks, mixing it up with Barneys I think, and that was a nearly-fire-able offense. I wanted to be a writer, and thought working with other writers, no matter where, would make that happen. I was wrong. So, two things: I now radically minimize the time I spend doing things in the present that are in service to the future, and, whenever possible and i know it isn't always, I don't want to do work that doesn't matter to me and/or is radically misaligned with my politics.
Kate (not verified)
Sat, 06/14/2008 - 10:29pm
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Jenna, I agree with you 100
Jenna,
I agree with you 100 percent. I worked in the legal profession before making the decision to go to library school. (In fact, I still work in the legal profession, but I am my firm's temp librarian until our regular librarian returns from maternity leave later this summer).
The positions I have held in my firms, especially my present firm, taught me management and leadership skills, and the importance of being a supreme multitasker. They come in handy now as a MLS student!
I don't regret taking the time off between undergraduate and graduate work - the time in the "real world" makes me appreciate the education more.
PS - don't feel guilty about sporadic blogging. If you look at my blog, I often go ten days between posts! In spite of promising myself that I would blog more since I am done with the semester, I find that my time is taken up with knitting, relaxing at the pool, and enjoying summer.
jenna
Wed, 06/18/2008 - 2:34pm
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Knitting, relaxing,
Knitting, relaxing, enjoying--time well spent, just like the time between college and grad school!
laura (not verified)
Wed, 06/18/2008 - 2:00pm
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I have an answer to your
I have an answer to your question that's actually a post I've been meaning to write for a long time -- perhaps now I'll actually do it.
But in the meantime, I am just having this amusing small world moment thinking about how my friend and I used to go to Spring Street Books in the early 90s. Her uncle worked their briefly, either before or after working at a futon shop nearby. It's funny to think I might have seen you long ago.
Melissa (not verified)
Thu, 06/19/2008 - 1:08am
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When I was 22 and 23 I
When I was 22 and 23 I worked for a managed behavioral health care company in San Francisco -- very corporate and largely heartless, but I was SO EXCITED to have my very own cubicle with a phone and a computer (a dedicated phone and computer being, I might add, something I barely have after 5+ years of working at my public library). One of the care managers in my department had this wonderful manner of being kind and fair and firm, and overhearing her navigate disagreements on the phone and with coworkers taught me something.
Then I was an admin assistant at the California Council for the Humanities, which was a good organization but a frustrating position for me (anyway, I was also thinking seriously about and then applying to library school during that last year in SF). That was a closely-knit (sometimes forcibly so) work environment in a comfortably shabby office, which I imagine is typical of a nonprofit job experience. A contrast to where I am now (except for the shabbiness), in my huge urban public library system.
To change around your topic, I would also add that it's beneficial for my activist side (both the reading/intellectual stuff and the volunteer activities) to work in a library, a place that's full of people totally different from me -- both colleagues and the public. Helps to avoid surrounding oneself with people who all come from the essentially the same class and think along more or less the same lines.
Chuck0 (not verified)
Thu, 06/19/2008 - 7:33pm
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I wish I could offer some
I wish I could offer some positive words of advice that would urge librarians to include offbeat jobs on their resumes. Unfortunately, as somebody who has been in the job market for most of my "career", I've gone on dozens and dozens of job interviews in the library and IT professions and I've found that libraries are uniformly conservative and myopic when it comes to a person's background. It might be possible for a *young* librarians to spin their offbeat jobs as relevant work experiences, but once you become a middle age librarian, libraries are more concerned about gaps on your resume and they want to see a progression in your background. In other words, libraries reward librarians who keep their nose to the grindstone and stay in positions for years.
I'm also convinced at this point that their is an expiration date on an MLS. In other professions, you are always considered to be a professional in that field. Once a lawyer (who passes the bar), always a lawyer, even if you take ten years off to do something else.
I've rarely found a potential library employer who was interested in non-library work that I had done. Most employers are looking for a reason to disqualify you from the search process. This is one reason why I think so many libraries are staffed by mediocre "lifers." I had a local library system cancel an interview with me because they decided that I "didn't have any branch library experience." Mind you, this was 15 years after I had left library school, so I have enough experience to run any library system and certainly a small branch library. Running an infoshop is practically like running a branch library and probably more challenging.
I'm glad that Jenna has shared her interesting job experiences. I think these experiences are what make Jenna an interesting person and a good librarian. But I'm extremely skeptical that most library employers would reward librarians who are upfront about their offbeat backgrounds. I've tried it and it doesn't work.
oznog (not verified)
Mon, 06/23/2008 - 7:34pm
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Hi Jenna. I've now added
Hi Jenna. I've now added this question to the list of questions I ask interviewees. I got in to library school because I listed "beekeeper" on my resume and the faculty member looking over applications thought (she told me years later!) "this person's either really interesting or really strange." Sure glad she took a gamble on this beekeeper :-)
jenna
Tue, 06/24/2008 - 11:03am
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Has she made her mind up yet
Has she made her mind up yet on interesting vs. strange?
Ami Ohayon (not verified)
Tue, 08/19/2008 - 11:00am
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I should preface this by
I should preface this by saying that I'm NOT a librarian ... in fact, I stumbled over your blog while searching the word beer! (Oh, the consequences of selling to your underage friends.)
Interesting articel though, and it caught my eye that you mentioned theatere directing. I still claim that directing a community theatre production of "Fiddler on the Roof" was the most complex and valuable bit of projsct management I ever experienced.
If you can get three dozen or so people singing and dancing in tune, in time, in unison, in costume, on stage, on a set, properly lit ... you can do darn near anything!