cpd23: My Path to Librarianship

My path to librarianship has been an interesting one. I did not grow up wanting to be a librarian. I grew up wanting to be a dentist, an orthodontist to be exact. How did I go from orthodontist to librarian you might ask? To make a long story short, I had an extremely bad freshman year in college. This experience prompted me to go from being a chemistry major to an English major two months into my sophomore year. Goodbye dentistry career. Anyway, I had also been working for my grandfather's commercial plumbing company since graduating high school. I worked there part-time while I was in college. So after I graduated with a BA in English, I continued working for his company. I ran his office and pretty much handled whatever he wanted me to do. During the time I worked there, I thought about going and getting a masters degree in something. In 2006, pursued my MS in Accounting for a semester, but in the end I decided it was not something that I wanted to do. In November 2007, my grandfather announced he was retiring. I decided then that I was also finished with the plumbing business. I have several cousins who are also in the plumbing business and I could have easily continued with that, but I decided that I was done with construction (and working for family) for good.

I wanted to pursue a masters degree that would let me utilize my undergraduate degree. An MA in English was out of the question. That degree is basically worthless by itself. My husband has 2 masters degrees, and one of them is an MLIS. So, I was already familiar with our alma mater's library program, and they already knew me. So I took the GRE and enrolled at UNCG in March 2008. I started grad school in August 2008. During my time there I was a graduate assistant for the department, a member of the LIS department's curriculum committee, Representative for the department on the Graduate Student Association, a reference intern, and president of the ALA student chapter. When I started library school I wanted to be a cataloger. All of my research, along with my independent study and practicum, were focused on cataloging. However, when it was time to apply for jobs it became evident that I was not going to be a cataloger. There were no cataloging jobs out there. The ones that I did see wanted 3-5 years experience which is impossible to have straight out of library school. Thank God I was also a reference intern while I was in grad school. It is the only reason I got a job.