Strangers have so far tended to view my BA in classics and my forthcoming MIS in librarianship as an intriguing tag-team of useless degrees. They say ‘Oh, I always thought being a librarian would be a cool job’, before smugly informing me of their success in a field I find utterly boring. I, too, thought librarianship would be awesome, but unlike them I went and made it happen.
Like many library students, I was that child who spent almost every lunchtime in the library, poring over (and ‘helpfully’ rearranging) books and playing computer games of dubious educational value. I learnt to read long before I started school and was encouraged by my doting mother, who made sure there were always plenty of books in our house. Yet I didn’t decide to become a librarian until just after I’d finished my undergrad, around the time I left a particularly unsatisfying job and realised I could do better.
Unlike many library students, I’ve been fortunate enough to find work in my field while studying. For an ‘obsolete’ profession, there sure is a lot of competition for library jobs! These days, I can’t imagine not being a librarian. It feels like what I was born to do. I love finding information, I love classifying it, preserving it, archiving it, rescuing it, presenting it to whoever is in need of it. Like Haribo gummi bears, knowledge is strangely addictive and I can’t get enough.