How did I get here?

Steven Chabot over at Subject/Object has a Question for men (and women too!) in the library field: How did you get here? I’ve given a pretty brief explanation of this already, but I haven’t mused much on my choices as they apply to my gender.

The short answer that I love to give is that the decision to go to library school was inspired by seeing a t-shirt design online, with the phrase she blinded me with library science. And that’s true, but I hope no one believes I’m a shallow enough person to base my career entirely on a t-shirt slogan.

As a young boy, I wanted to become either a major league baseball player or a scientist, both of which are male-dominated professions. Of course, at that age, I didn’t fully appreciate the extent of either career; I believed that being a star baseball player mainly involved showing up to games and hitting home runs and that being a scientist mainly involved wearing a white coat and mixing chemicals. At any rate, I believe my interest in both of these fields waned before I discovered at school that I did not have the aptitude for either one.

In high school, I dreamed of becoming a computer programmer (another typically male career) after witnessing the popularization of the internet and watching movies like Hackers, but again, the activity turned out to be much more difficult than I’d imagined. To make matters worse, for some strange reason the university computer science programs I looked into also required chemistry, which I’d already dismissed.

I discovered psychology in my first year at UBC and fell head over heels for it – I loved studying the way people think, and I especially loved the fact that it followed the scientific method without being too, well, sciency. I opted for courses in social and developmental psychology (the least sciency ones), which meant that my classes were overwhelmingly female, as the men were taking cognitive and biopsych. Then again, even my honours class, which was made up of students from all areas of psych, was disproportionately filled with women. At any rate, I had no objection to being in a female-dominated field, and to be completely fair, although there were fewer male students, the ratio was much more even at the faculty level. My plan at that point was to one day become a psych professor myself.

After graduation, when I made the decision to choose library school over psych programs, I don’t think I was fully aware of the gender disparity in the LIS field. Of course I knew the stereotypes of the shushing librarian with her hair in a bun, but my high school librarian was a man, and I’d dealt with a number of male academic librarians at UBC. And then there’s the hero of Questionable Content (the webcomic that produces the aforementioned t-shirt), who is male and works in a library. In fact, one of the only librarians I actually talked to between applying to library school and starting the program was a gentleman I happened to meet while working at a restaurant in downtown Toronto. Even from that time, I’ve always been most interested in academic libraries, and I equate academic librarianship with academia in general, which was once a male-dominated domain but is now much more gender-neutral (at least in terms of the gender ratio of academics – I’m not trying to start a debate on whether male and female academics have equal opportunities!).

So when I finally started at SIS, I was quite surprised to find that my class was literally about 90% female. To be fair, men in my year are especially scarce – there are significantly more in next year’s graduating class. I haven’t found it to be much of an issue, though. I believe my gender has neither hindered nor helped me at SIS, except that professors are quick to learn my name because there are so few male names and faces to keep apart.

Steven wants to know how to encourage more men to take librarianship seriously, and here’s my advice:

• Show them that it’s challenging and intellectually stimulating, that it’s an academic pursuit that can lead to tenure
• Show them that it’s not about shushing and making sure no one tries to walk off with the reference books
• Show them that it involves technology and keeping up with the latest innovations
• Show them that it can take a variety of forms, each with its own strengths, including academic, public, school, and special librarianship

I’m certainly not saying that these points will only appeal to men – show them to women too! What I’m really suggesting is that we make people look beyond the stereotypes and see what the field is really about. Show them the breadth of opportunities available, and surely there will be something that they find appealing.

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How I found my summer job

I thought I’d say a few words about how I landed my summer job. Working in Ottawa for the summer is a popular choice for Canadian students, especially for those of us who attend school in the eastern part of the country (since, as we all know, Canada’s really big). The federal government encourages students by helping to arrange for us to find three- to four-month full-time positions with federal organizations, often not just related to our fields but actually quite tremendous opportunities, that employers would likely never offer us on the free market. This is how I ended up working for the federal government this summer.

My interview (which was mercifully over the phone, since Montreal is close but not THAT close to Ottawa) was not actually for the position I ended up with. My name had been selected from the FSWEP pool as a candidate for a reference position at the Industry Canada library in downtown Ottawa. When I accepted their offer of an interview, I was fully aware of two major problems, but I was happy enough to have been offered an interview that I didn’t worry too much. The first problem was that the job required me to be bilingual, and the second was that my French is quite weak. When the interview finally took place, they asked me five questions, to which I gave four rather good responses and one embarrassingly bad one; indeed, the interviewers seemed quite impressed with all of my answers except the one in French (though they were certainly nice enough about it).

Now, I’ve hunted for summer jobs enough times to know that my first interview of the season is not usually my best, so I chalked it up as a practice run and expected not to hear from Industry Canada again. To my surprise, a few weeks later I received a call from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, which is a very small part of Industry Canada, and they wanted to know whether I would accept a position at the CIPO Resource Centre in Gatineau, immediately across the bridge from downtown Ottawa. Apparently IC had liked me enough that they’d passed my name on to CIPO, where they were looking for a summer student for a non-bilingual position.

Anyway, it’s been a great experience so far – and it’s hard to believe the summer is almost halfway through!

Alive and well in Ottawa

I realize I haven’t posted in what, by blogging standards, is a very long time, but don’t fret. I’ve just been setting myself up in Ottawa, where I have a summer job working for the Canadian Intellectual Property Office Resource Centre. To be honest, I’d never put much thought into working in a government library before being offered this job, but I recognized it as a terrific opportunity. I found the position (or to be more accurate, it found me) through the Federal Student Work Experience Program (FSWEP), which is an absolute must for Canadian students and students studying in Canada looking for a summer job.

I will post more about the job soon, but for now I will show you how pretty Ottawa is in May (click for more Ottawa photos in my Flickr stream):

Story of my life

I’m happy to report that I’ve completed my first year of library school, and at the moment I’m spending some time with my parents in Toronto before I start my summer job in Ottawa on May 1st. Looking back over my year, I decided that now would be a good time to write a personal post about my experiences leading up to my MLIS program. I’m not sure that my story is typical of library school students, but then again, it seems that we come from a pretty wide variety of backgrounds.

I received my BA in psychology from UBC in the spring of 2006 (two whole years ago – wow!). At that point, I had never considered library school; I was vaguely aware of the field of “library science,” but I had no idea that being a librarian required a Master’s degree. To be perfectly honest, my main use of the public library was as a free DVD rental service, and I only went to the UBC libraries when I was performing research that couldn’t be done through their online services.

Upon graduation, my plan was to pursue graduate studies in social psychology. Fortunately, the other part of my plan was to take a year off, in order to write the dreaded GREs, put some time into my grad school applications, and then spend the rest of the year living in Paris and working on my French. I say fortunately because, looking back, I now realize how important that year was in terms of figuring out what I really wanted to do with myself. In many ways that year was disappointing (I spent months studying for a test that I didn’t end up needing at all, and I had to cut my time in Europe short), but it was entirely necessary, and I would implore anyone thinking about going straight from undergrad to grad school to consider taking some time off in between.

Shortly before the application deadlines, I was struck with a rather unsettling notion – perhaps psychology was not the right field of study for me. After close to four years of preparing for a career as a psych professor, I suddenly realized that I wanted a grad school experience that would leave me with a wider variety of options. Around that time, I also stumbled upon a t-shirt for sale from one of my favourite webcomics, Questionable Content. Here I am last August, just before heading off to library school, wearing this supremely nerdy shirt:

No joke – that’s really how the idea of library school occurred to me. I saw it on a t-shirt design.

Fortunately, I still had time to apply. I actually didn’t spend much time comparing schools. I’d been wanting to live in Montreal for a long time, and I knew McGill was a prestigious school (in general, not necessarily for its library school in particular), so it was my first choice and in early 2007 I was accepted.

Whew. I think that’s enough for now, but at some point I will move on to my reflections about library school itself. I hope the weather is as nice where you are as it is in Toronto right now!