Caveat Lector

The situation with my new-librarian acquaintance (click links if you need to refresh your memory) has escalated to full-blown dramarama-ding-dong. What it boils down to is, I cannot save someone who is absolutely full-blown determined not to be saved, never mind lifting a finger to save herself.

New Librarian is living rent-free with parents. She has her own room, access to a car and the Internet, a membership at a local gym, and so on. Pretty sweet deal—and if you ask me, that’s part of the problem. New Librarian doesn’t have to find her own scratch and never has, so why should she start now?

(Yes, yes. I know why; it’s in the Celestina quote in my sidebar. But independence has never been one of New Librarian’s priorities.)

So let’s look at the timeline here, just for fun. New Librarian decided (per her blog, which I refuse to link to because it would immediately destroy any chance she has of getting hired anywhere, ever) not to start her job search during her last semester of library school. So she started job-hunting in mid-May. I heard about her situation in November, by which time she’d given up. Six months, give or take a few weeks.

I hope you’re rolling your eyes too.

And let’s look at New Librarian’s requirements, again just for fun. Her geographic and demographic demands (again, per her blog) limited her to perhaps one-tenth of the country. She refused to look for work in the skill-area in which she is actually trained and qualified, because she “doesn’t want to do that.” Even better, her latest blog entries indicate that she despises the job she says she now wants to do!

(And what she now wants to do is reference, and calling her “not a people person” would be a distinct kindness.)

She won’t go to conferences. I had to practically pull teeth to convince her to do an online reference seminar. She has no concept that librarianship is more than just an eight-hour-a-day job. She has no concept that it’s a community of practice that she needs to find a way to fit into. Honestly, she has no concept that such things as communities of practice or networks exist, in any profession. That’s what happens when you reach the ripe age of 28 never having held a job.

When I looked at New Librarian’s résumé and cover letter, I saw why she wasn’t being hired or even interviewed; they were dreadful. Okay, so this kind of thing can be fixed, and we fixed it… but somehow, New Librarian never quite got the message that the problems with the first batch meant she really needed to write the old search off and start fresh.

So she’s given up. Again. And you may all call me evil—I won’t even argue with you—but I am really running out of forbearance here. What’s driving me all the way around the bend is the simply poisonous attitude she has taken toward all this. Because she didn’t get a job immediately, both her master’s degrees are worthless. Because she hasn’t landed a library job yet (in the wrong skill area, forsooth!), she’s giving up. Because they aren’t the jobs she (thinks she) trained for, any other job is automatically a big step down.

Which is really more class-snobbery than I can easily take, and the reason I put this post in the category I did, because I see this in more academics (ex- and otherwise) than I care to mention. And if you’re wincing as you read this: grow up. The entirety of the world’s expertise and skill resteth not with academe.

“If a BA can sit at a reference desk, what did I go and get a master’s for?” she asked petulantly yesterday. Well, hell, honey, I can’t answer that one for you. I certainly have suspicions. I suspect you did it because you were afraid. I suspect you did it because you thought landing a job would be easy afterwards. I suspect you did not do it because of any genuine affinity for the field, or you’d not be piling on the scorn the way you are. I suspect that you want a reference desk instead of the area you trained for because you think it’ll be easy. Whether my suspicions are correct or in-, you need to answer the “why did I go to graduate school?” question for yourself and then move on.

(I give the same advice to ex-academics fairly regularly. I don’t know what it is, but it just kills some people to admit they either made a shortsighted mistake or didn’t cover their rears adequately. Or both; I assuredly did both my first time through. It’s childish to hate graduate school because it isn’t vocational school. Hate it because it’s abusive, hate it because it tells immense whoppers about being vocational school, hate it because it sucks up too much life and energy for too little intellectual or vocational return. But don’t get all in a twist because you don’t have a job—especially if, like New Librarian, you haven’t actually stirred a step out of your way to land one.)

I am in contact with New Librarian’s parents, who are afraid to lay the appropriate smackdown because New Librarian “shuts down” when they try, since she “is threatened by them” and (eye-rolling alert, folks) “her self-esteem is shattered.” I shall endeavor to convince them that some tough love is in order.

Like I said. Drama-rama-rama. I don’t know how this is going to end, but my needle is edging toward the “not well” end of the scale. And thus endeth the rant, which I apologize for inflicting on everyone; I wouldn’t have if I weren’t completely fed up.

So I’ve got another couple friends now who are dipping their toes into the first-job water, and finding that water mighty cold. Fairly typically, they are thinking about going back for post-graduate education.

I don’t think that’s wise, and I’ve said so. Remains to be seen whether they listen.

I’ll say it right out. Once you have a bachelor’s degree, experience matters more than education. A ton of education without experience looks suspicious to employers, and I can’t say I disagree, because of all the folks who flee into graduate school to avoid the bruising slog that is the first-job search. Who wants to hire frightened people? (Answer: nobody you want to work for, trust me.)

Thing is, the search for a first job is always, always, always a slog. If you’re going to grad school because you think a job will just magically fall into your lap afterwards, please, please don’t. It won’t happen, and you’ll just end up hating graduate school and hating yourself for going.

Go do some work first. There’s lots of work out there that doesn’t require any particular specialization. If you don’t know where it is, your first job is to find out. And yes, a lot of that work sucks, but that doesn’t mean you don’t learn from it.

My new-librarian acquaintance is still looking. I know her pretty well, and as much as I want her to find a job, I find myself stopping short of actually recommending her to people. I myself wouldn’t hire her. It’s not even the lack of experience—it’s all the rough edges that a first job knocks off you that she still has, and the ceaseless virulent childish cynicism that would make her terrible to share an office with.

I don’t know how to fix that. Any suggestion from me that her attitude is part of the problem is only going to be met with—you know, attitude. But I’d lay odds that if she’d had a few jobs in her early 20s, she wouldn’t be languishing without so much as callbacks now.

Given the choice between a bad job and a bad graduate education, always take the job; at least it pays you, whereas you have to pay professors to maltreat you. Given the choice between a bad job and a decent graduate education—if you have no work experience, take the job. It’ll be worth far more in the job market than the additional degree. I absolutely guarantee it.

I was about to say that the email I reproduce below is a complete novelty, but of course it isn’t. I have heard all the sentiments in it before. O ye readers who have felt or expressed them, know that ye be not alone. This is the company ye have found:

Dear Madam,

I am a mathematics graduate student. I am only in first year. Perhaps I do have a lot to see. But I cannot believe in the honest truth of all your allegations and rantings at “misconceptions” among academics. I do concede that your writing style, clarity of thought and approach do reflect very well on your abilities. Yet, it appears to me that you have done yourself no favour by looking only at the negative side of things. At times, the points you make, especially the one about the non-phd instructor at UNCH do not make much sense to me. Would you say the same about a quack doctor who gets along well with his patients? It is certainly possible to get along with a very modest medical practice after having spent two yrs in med school or so? Learn some terms- how to prescribe for colds, flu, viral fever, etc; my mother is a doctor; i could pretty much prescribe them myself from what I heard at home about my mom’s work! That said, it must be admitted that you did face a lot of bad luck, but surely you will not disagree with me saying that more merit lies in overcoming difficulties than in bowing out and then expressing bitterness on a web page(?) You might go all the way and claim that you are not bitter, that you have never felt better and the like; but your mammoth effort in building up the webpage speaks for itself. There is an iota of guilt left in you, a little something that tells you that people have faced greater odds and come out trumps and that you should have persevered. Easier said than done, though. I just hope that I do not have the kind of luck that you have had. There is a certain something that strikes a chord with me- yes my profs in undergrad school wanted me to stay back, but I wanted to be a ‘man’. Hopefully I have not made a big mistake.

And one more thing: please tone down your attack against academia: only the imbecile can exult in their failure. Why not accept one’s failure? Yes, it is obvious that the academia did not live up to its professed ideals in your case. There is a lot of injustice in the world. Yet, you have a misconception as well; “Earning a Phd SHOULD BE only about scholastic abilities”. What makes you think so? Why did you not start out in grad school with the assumption that you will be pitted against odds of all kinds: academic, financial, social; that there will be people out there to exploit your abilities? Is it not the way in every other walk of life? Your error lies in the fact that you presupposed that academia would be holy and pure, unscathed by all worldly follies. That is why you feel bitter about academia now. If you had started out with the idea: this is my “career”! There will be vultures out there and I will give them a good fight. Then you could have said: well, I did not have the abilities to win the fight. What I am trying to say is that one should perceive a PhD as an all round achievement, not confined to scholastics alone. In your case, you had all the academic ability on your side, but not the fortitude and certainly not the luck. That should take care of all your ‘grievances’. It is pointless to have grievances against fate, you can do nothing about them.

Here is wishing you the very best of luck. If you think that I have a point, i would be grateful no end to hear from you.

My father was the first to say these things, as it happens.

Time for a good sinus-clearing rrrrrrrrrrrrRANT. Haven’t done one of those in a while.

Got an email today from another peep on the way out of graduate school. He had two questions for me. The second one was how he’d explain “wasting” a year in grad school to the professional schools he now means to apply to. Yes, well, they mostly won’t care, and I told him so.

The first question, ver-fricking-batim, was “How can I leave graduate school, if I have no real career skills?”

Gah. Some people would go lie down with a fit of the vapors. I don’t have the vapors right now. I have whatever it’s called when you want to go wring some handy necks.

You. Out there. Yes, you. You 22-year-old kid scared of the workforce, not sure what you’re going to do in it. If I catch your little shrinking-violet butt going to grad school (especially in the humanities) just so you don’t have to try for a job, I swear unto whatever $DEITY heedeth my oath that I will come out there and kick said butt with my copper-toed hobnailed stompy boot. You hear me?

You don’t acquire career skills in graduate school. (What graduate school teaches is not career skills, even for the career they’re nominally apprenticing you to. Honest. I do not kid.) You certainly don’t acquire work experience there. You acquire useful things such as work skills and work experience by, you know, W-O-R-K-I-N-G.

I actually don’t much care what you work at, youngster. Chances are, it’ll be low-paid, high-stress, and not what you want to do for the rest of your life. That’s cool. You won’t be doing it for the rest of your life. You’ll be doing it until you find something better, or until revelation comes down from on high about what you do want to do for the rest of your life, at which point I magnanimously concede that grad school (especially professional school) in the desired area is a reasonable decision.

Just, please, dammit, don’t end up like a certain new librarian I know, okay? She ducked into grad school right after undergrad. When she got out, she didn’t find work, partly because she had all the job-seeking sense of a spavined tree-sloth, and partly because People Who Should Have Known Better told her to hold out for more than the entry-level jobs in her field that she could have landed and should have been chasing.

So what did she do? After a couple years of, um, farting around (sorry, there is no more polite way to put it), she ducked back into grad school, this time in librarianship. She graduated same time I did. I’m employed. She’s not, in some part because she clearly expected to land the first job she applied to and dropped out of the market with a bruised ego when she didn’t. (Free clue: I sent out somewhere in the ballpark of fifty résumés to land the job I’m in.) Also in part because her résumé was middling at best and her cover letters were atrocious, bad enough to knock her out of contention at any library I can think of.

Actually, I shouldn’t say she’s not employed. She’s working. At a big-box retailer, and—shall we say—not in management. Seven and change an hour. She’s 28. With no real work experience, and no clue how to get any. Employers aren’t impressed by that, and I’m frankly hard-pressed to say they should be.

I’m doing my best for her, but I’m under no illusions; this will be a long haul.

Do not be her. Do not pass “go to grad school,” and do not pay $200 to apply, hear me? She is deeply unhappy and bitter. Grad school did not help. Grad school hurt, because the kind of knockabout entry-level life that’s only expected at 22 is both less attractive and less feasible at 28. (Heck, it wasn’t fun at 26 when I did it. Though of the five jobs plus temping stints I’ve had since age 22, there’s only one I really wish I hadn’t taken. The entry-level life frequently isn’t as bad as it’s painted.)

Haul your butt out of school and into the job market before I have to haul out my stompy boot. Thus endeth the serm—I mean rant.

Says Gillian Barr of San Diego:

I just looked up The Graduate Grind on Amazon and saw that its Amazon listing identified the term “student welfare” as a “SIP: statistically improbable phrase” w/in the book. That struck me as very funny in a dark-humor sort of way…

I can’t add a thing to that.

I’ve been inching my way through The Graduate Grind by Patricia Hinchey and Isabel Kimmel. Usually I devour books, but books on this particular subject I have to nibble at, because otherwise I get stomachaches. Really. I do. Lovitts, Cude, Nelson, the Kerlins—I have to read them slowly.

The Graduate Grind is an excellent book, a book that lives up to its subtitle as few books do. I’ll have more to say about it once I’ve finished it.

I feel that I owe Hinchey and Kimmel an apology, actually. The episode they seized on as emblematic of the bureaucratic futility of so many grad-school quests is the one I documented least. I wish I still had that documentation; I truly do.

I know why I don’t. The only way I could keep going (which I did, for two and a half more years) after the contretemps with the fellowships office was to bury the entire mess as deep into the unused back rooms of my head as I could. That meant deleting the evidence. I didn’t know that I’d want it later. I only knew I very badly didn’t want to see it any more then.

So I’m sorry. I wish I’d been smarter. Which sums up my entire first grad-school experience, really.

That said, I did eventually dig up one piece of evidence I couldn’t find then: my father’s fisking of me by email after I finally ’fessed up about leaving. I didn’t post it. I do still have it, but I’m just as dubious about posting it as I ever was. I’m not worried about its impact on me; I’ve nothing to prove to him, any more. I just don’t like the idea of painting him in that light. Easier to let people think I’m vilely unfilial, to call my own dad a character assassin.

For whatever reason, there’s been an uptick in the grad-student email I’ve been getting lately. (I keep it all. I really should analyze it for timing, because it does come in clumps, and I’m not sure why.) I do notice that I’m hearing from more students early in their programs these days, and that suits me fine. I’d rather get ’em out fast, start ’em doing something more productive and less soul-twisting. The early-birds mostly don’t break my heart the way the long-termers do.

Anyway. Got a note from an early-bird this morning before I left for work. After the usual embarrassingly effusive thanks, the writer explained to me that he’d gone to grad school in order to impress his professors. He’d show ’em. He’d prove to them how smart and capable he was.

If I had a magic wand, and could wave it to remove from graduate school anyone for whom this was their only or primary motivation… I think everyone involved would thank me, in the long run. I’d wave that wand, too. I would. It would have caught me, the first time.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting praise. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the important people in your life to value you. There’s everything wrong with choosing an expensive and risky course of action purely so that they will praise and value you. Even wronger, if you’re trying to reverse previous poor opinion. It’ll never happen. No matter what you do, they won’t love you any more for it.

That’s where I am with my dad. He’ll never value me much. I was supposed to be an academic, and I’m not (even though MPOW’s ID card calls me “faculty”). I have therefore entered the “disappointment” cubbyhole, and it doesn’t actually matter what I do with my life—I’ll never get out of there. That’s what I mean when I say I’ve nothing to prove to him. There’s nothing I can prove to him. He hasn’t got the frame of reference to value what I am and what I do.

Said another way, when the other half of the sketch—the valuer—both predicates the valuee’s value on one particular life-path and hasn’t got enough vision to value any other, the situation transcends wrongness into sheer horror. This describes more career academics than I even want to think about. My father. Several advisers I’ve had. This poor lad’s undergraduate professors.

(I’m letting UW-SLIS off the hook on this one, incidentally. They may have been disappointed that I resisted their siren calls, but they sped me on my way with good wishes, and they’ll be proud of what I accomplish in the profession.)

It’s an external motivation, not an internal one. Internal motivations won’t ensure graduate-school survival or an academic career, but lack of internal motivation will damn straight torpedo them more often than not. The other possibility for those who find their external motivations disappointed is lifelong bitter feuding, and who on earth really wants that?

If you’re an academic? Especially if you’ve never had another career? Don’t use “you should go to graduate school!” as an ego-stroke for your best undergrads. Just don’t. Please, if what you mean is “wow, you’re smart!” just say so. Your kids aren’t sophisticated enough to realize that you have a blinkered perspective on the work world, much less that your recommendations aren’t to be treated as holy writ. If you insist on sending them into a meat-grinder anyway—it’s on you. It’s on you. Not the kid.

I’m damn tired of counseling your ex-undergrads, I tell you what. I’m tired of blood leaking from my heart over what your flippant advice did to them.

I won’t stop, though, certainly not for your sake. I’ve got nothing to prove to you. More and more of your kids are getting their marching orders from me these days. Think of that, and tremble at your enrollments.

Yeah, so you know what Google Print enables? The print egosurf. Never been possible before.

(Oh, shut up. If you haven’t already done it, you’re going to as soon as you finish reading this post. Maybe sooner.)

The first result on my own egosurf I fully expected. The second? Hel-LO NURSE! I had no idea.

MPOW has the book. I am so ganking it on Monday. Because I’m not at all sure I agree with the author’s interpretation as presented in that little snippet.

Joy had a presentation that went well, not that that surprises me.

I only wanted to add a Point the Fourth to her three: you should present at a conference while you’re an LIS graduate student. Presentation is a vitally important job skill, and getting your name and face out in front of people never, ever hurts.

Frankly, I find presenting far easier than a lot of the other stuff that comes under the heading of “networking,” and it works just about as well, as far as I can tell.

So do it. Present. It won’t kill you, and it’ll make you stronger.

By the way, I know it’s been quiet around here lately. Combination of work weirdness (that very definitely needs to stay off-blog, but it’s nothing that directly harms me, so nobody should worry on my account) and work for a TAG client eating up huge chunks of my time at home.

(Bet you thought I’d never post to this category again, huh?)

Glory hallelujah, my alma mater redesigned its website, finally. Type’s a bit small, layout isn’t liquid, and I wish the colored hover in the navigation was all-over hot-clickable (hint: put display:block on your a tag and use span as needed inside), but it’s still pretty darn good.

It was embarrassingly ugly during my tenure there. We (the student LITA group, that is) made some noises about redoing it, but I and others got distracted and the politics got byzantine, and… well, it never happened.

Glad it’s happened now.

The best blogging on library-as-workplace these days is happening over at Rochelle’s. If she keeps it up, I’ll just have to hang up my keyboard—on this topic, at any rate.

The latest installment discusses the often-fraught relationship between academic librarians and the teaching and research faculty who represent one of their constituencies as well as—possibly, anyway—their colleagues.

I won’t bother summarizing her argument, because I want everybody to go read her post. (The article she links to is good stuff also.) All I want to do is point out that while she and I come from remarkably similar backgrounds vis-à-vis academia, we’ve definitely come to dissimilar conclusions about how we care to relate to faculty.

Which isn’t to say either of us is right, wrong, brilliant, delusional, or anything of that nature. A lot of this is situational, for one thing. I’m not in a tenure-track librarian job, so in a very real sense, I don’t have to show I’m somehow the equal of a faculty member. If I’d been offered the job in Ruritania, things would be different.

I could not repress, however, an entirely cynical response to this:

We want the teaching faculty (and by this I mean anyone from the rank of associate professor on up) to see us as their equals, as comrades-in-arms in the daily battle to produce good scholarship, excellent graduates, and better the general welfare of our shared institution and Knowledge in general. We want a standing invitation to the faculty club. We don’t want to be seen as the help.

With all due respect, I don’t think the problem there is us. The problem there is faculty: to be specific, a large (though not, of course, all-encompassing) faction among faculty who simply cannot respect any path but theirs. They can’t imagine that librarians are highly educated, because in their rarefied world, all the highly-educated people are faculty. They can’t imagine that librarians are smart, ditto. Nor can they admit that anyone but they has a stake in the business of information.

We’re not going to change that by going through we’re-faculty-too rituals, because of this same stubborn snob cadre. It doesn’t matter what we know, what we publish, or what we teach. We are not faculty, therefore we count for nothing. (Anybody noticing a similar dynamic in the librarian-parapro wars gets a gold star. We librarians have our own snob cadre, undoubtedly.)

One of the worst systemic problems in academia, in my highly biased and unreliable opinion, is that it selects for the snob cadre. If you’re not darn near monomaniacal, you don’t make it through grad school. If you’re not darn near tunnel-visioned, you don’t want to make it through grad school. If you’re not darn near totally convinced that academia is a holy calling to which only the select ascend, you don’t darn near kill yourself getting tenure.

(In passing—and I am very carefully not naming names here—I notice that several blog-academicians who objected vociferously to my anti-academia stance back in the day are now contemplating leaving academia themselves, or are already gone. The plural of anecdote is not data, admittedly. I do think, though, that blog-academicians tend not to be part of the snob cadre; the snob cadre is full of Ivan Tribble and his ilk. And the non-snob-cadre is more likely to have professional crises, and far more likely to see the wider world as potentially attractive, which boils down to “more likely to leave.”)

Frankly, I don’t want to be equal to the snob cadre. I don’t want to be in their club. So much so that, yes, in my eyes the snob cadre has poisoned the rest of the well. I’ve got absolutely zero interest in being “one of the pack with these people,” as Rochelle puts it. I’ve nothing invested in their opinion of my scholarly pursuits or intellectual capacity. If I’m merely “the help” to the snob cadre, I’m in company whose excellence far surpasses anything the snob cadre can muster. (Who wants to be pals with Ivan Tribble? Seriously. Even on a workplace level of palliness.)

What do I want? To do my job. Like Rochelle, I believe I can do my job best when faculty are receptive to what I have to offer. Unlike Rochelle, I don’t think the I’m-just-like-you-really card is the only, or the best, card in my hand.

I’ll play that card, if it’s expedient. Sure, why not? My ΦΒΚ certificate is hanging in my cube (mostly because that frees up the closet space in our apartment!). I’ve also got my tassel and a couple of library-school graduation pictures in my cube, though those are mostly for my own morale. Eventually I’ll get my other academic detritus framed and hung in the cube too. It can all live there along with Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Mighty Plush Cthulhu, and the shoggoth.

But if it’s more effective to baffle ’em with tech-talk, that’s what I’ll do. If an allied-expert stance gets a better response than playing faculty-manqué (and in my specific situation, I incline to think it will), then I’ll act all consultant-like. If they’ll give work to “the help” that they wouldn’t give to a perceived equal, I’ll happily reinforce whatever expectations they have of “the help.” I don’t care, as long as the job gets done.

What I won’t do is hide my history, despite my strong sense thus far that academic librarianship would like me to—when I talk about my first grad-school experience with my work colleagues, the fidgety nervousness and edgy laughter are all but palpable. Of course I don’t make a point of mentioning that I’m a dropout, but if it comes up in conversation, it comes up. If snob-cadre faculty want to think worse of me because I washed out, fine. I truly don’t care; I have a job to be getting on with, and any faculty who won’t deal with me because of my chequered academic history would probably have found some other excuse not to anyway.

I’m also concerned about creating a spurious separation between librarians who can play with the faculty on the faculty’s terms and librarians who can’t. Not all academic librarians have extra sheepskins lying around. The last thing we want to do is train faculty to respect only those who do. That’s professional mass suicide, is what that is.

That’s really the only serious objection I have to other librarians employing I’m-just-like-you-really tactics, though. If it works, it works. I just recommend some clarity about it (let’s not ever do it just to massage our egos; Rochelle’s clearly too big for that, thank goodness), and some thought toward developing additional alternatives. We’re librarians. We are to be worshipped. We don’t have to see the inside of the Faculty Club door just to kick informational butt.