Our guest speakers were John Schuster from Morrisville State College and Jan Fleckenstein from the Barclay Law Library here at Syracuse. John had a really interesting career path, starting out as a philosophy grad student (!) before going to library school and working for about 15 years for a database vendor as an instructor, traveling around the world to train customers, before taking a job in his hometown at the Morrisville State College library. Jan has worked in law libraries for 25 years and has finally decided she's at the point in her career that she needs a law degree, so she's working on her J.D. now. So I took away a couple of pieces of advice from their talks:
- Learn how to learn, because you'll be learning all through your professional career.
- You can leverage one subject specialty into other subject specialties. Both of them started out somewhere other than where they expected to end up. Jan pointed out that even an undergraduate background in a specialty area can serve you as an academic librarian, so with my masters plus ABD I should be on the right track. And John ended up teaching philosophy at Morrisville, as well as talking philosophy for four hours when his boss interviewed him for his previous position.
- Be prepared to teach, because you'll be teaching patrons even if you're not doing formal instruction.
I'm tired and I've still got stuff to do, so if you think this post needs more cowbell, here you go.
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