Not Your Typical Reference Librarian – Or How I Found My Career
Posted January 15, 2014 by Carolyn Lucas
2014 just started – and I already feel like we’re in the middle of the year! This time of the year is always so busy, because you’re turning over a new leaf, trying to develop all of these habits – and also attempting to remember to re-vaccinate the dog, to take the car in to be inspected, and so much more. But the biggest thing that I am excited about for 2014 is that I am now fully employed – in an amazing position that I am so excited about.
I have spoken in this blog before about the traditional library position, and how I just don’t seem to fit that mold. In several of the classes there is talk about other types of libraries that one could make a career out of, including law libraries and medical libraries. For me, the records management class consisted primarily of talking about small local-government records management – but all of these subsets really only scratch the surface of the types of jobs that exist. For me, I seem to have found my niche working in records management in a biopharmaceutical company.
As I said, I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: don’t force yourself into a position that you don’t love just because you feel it’s the only thing out there. You don’t need to do reference if your passion is elsewhere! (Yes, you might have to do reference for a while, but keep looking…you will find that thing you are passionate about.)
The position that I have as a clinical document technician is one that I never even knew existed until after I worked at this company for some time. I mean, it makes sense: clinical drug trials are producing documents, and those documents need to be managed… but who knew you could make a career out of it?! Seriously, there needs to be a newsletter, or public service announcement, or something.
In conjunction with this new position, I am also doing my 502 internship at Harvard as a research assistant for a super cool exhibition that will be going out in October. While “research assistant” doesn’t seem like the most practical of job titles, let me tell you: I am so excited about this internship. But I am mostly excited about the way that my two major commitments this semester will interact with one another: will researching in the archives at Harvard help me to better navigate and organize these files at Harvard, and vice versa? Can I develop a self-driven project from soup to nuts? How can I work managing these two very large commitments at the same time? It’s slightly overwhelming, but…very exciting. I am sure that I will be having more insights as the semester progresses, but for the time being I wish you all the best in starting your own semester, and finding your own passions – mainstream or unheard of as they might be!