Up Front: Second Life
By Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow
In a bad economy, it's tempting to think that working adults who return to school do so merely to escape a sour job market. But libraries and archives have always been a draw for people making a mid-career shift. In this issue, we profile incoming, current, and recent GSLIS students who started their working lives doing something else and, for many reasons, have decided to become librarians or archivists.
Parallel Lives
Sara Smith '10LS has been creating
dances since the mid-1990s, when
she studied painting but switched to
choreography in her senior year of
college. "I was looking for more of a
sense of movement and motion," she
says. Her dances, which she calls
"very quiet pieces," are somewhat
nontraditional and may include
sitting, walking, standing, and hand
gestures. "The kind of dance I like is
based in anatomy and is an
exploration of what joints and bones
and muscles and gravity do. It's
almost like dance that explores
physics," she says. Smith, who scores
most of her dances, mounts her
productions in small theaters on bare-bones budgets. The
intimacy is part of her aesthetic but it is also out of necessity:
there is no money to be made in dance. "Even choreographers
who are pretty well known have a very hard time financially," she
says. "Dance is one of the lowest-funded art forms."
For more than a decade, Smith has subsidized her artwork — which also includes videos and multimedia installations — with grants and jobs in arts administration. Though she could live and create her art on what she made, development work took a lot of time and energy, and it had an aspect she didn't like. "I'm a behind-the-scenes person," she says. "In my art, I like to court people and invite them to invest themselves in the work I'm making. But in my everyday life, I want a different level of interaction. I didn't want to do that in my day job anymore." Smith, whose recent dances have been scientifically inclined — she's made pieces about Einstein's special theory of relativity, Pluto's demotion from planet status, and the daredevil scientists who invented hot-air balloons — has had no formal science training since high school, and the works required a lot of background research in libraries and archives. Which she happens to love doing. "It's almost like the reason I make art is so that I can investigate a subject," she says.
A couple of years ago, she met a poet who worked as the curator of a literature collection at Yale's Beinecke Library. "She was like, 'I've got the best day job in the world,'" she says. When Smith learned about a career in an archives, "I thought, that is the best job." In 2007, at 35, she enrolled in GSLIS. She now works part- time in the MIT archives and will finish classes this semester. She hopes to find a fulltime archives job at a university when she graduates — a career she sees as a sidestep, rather than a leap, from her work as an artist. "The work I do in archives is parallel to what I do as a choreographer: research, organizing, and synthesizing information, facilitating exchange of ideas," she says. "I'm very excited about my involvement in this field." She's now working on a dance piece about a handful of Emilys, woven around the life and work of Emily Dickinson.
A Love of Old Books
Smith is hardly alone in her decision
to shift to librarianship, which has
long been a haven for career
changers. It is, some librarians
claim, a vocation in which the more
experience and accumulated
knowledge practitioners have, the
better. In recent years, as the field
has become more technology
oriented, library schools have
attracted an increasing number of
younger students, many right out of
college. Still, about 62 percent of
students enrolled in library and
information science programs in
North American universities are over 30, according to a 2004
report from the Association for Library and Information Science
Education.
Career changers come to GSLIS for lots of reasons. They want to try something new; they want a less stressful day job; they lost their previous job; or they want to increase their options, particularly in a bleak economy.
The latter is the case for Jeremiah Mercurio '11LS, who is less a career changer than, perhaps, a career expander. Mercurio has spent the last decade preparing to work as a professor of English literature. He will defend his Ph.D. dissertation this fall, which is also his first semester at GSLIS.
Last year, while studying and teaching at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, he began applying for academic posts but was quickly disillusioned. "The academic job market shrank substantially this year," he says. He estimates that a quarter of the 30 to 40 jobs he saw advertised were later withdrawn because of budget cuts.
Mercurio considered his options. His Ph.D. research is on late- Victorian authors and illustrators like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Beyond the philosophy and writing and drawing style of the so-called "Decadent" artists, he was interested in 19th- century books themselves and spent a lot of time in archives and museums chasing down first editions. So when it looked as if he was going to have to put an academic career on hold, he says, "It was natural for me to want to do archives." Mercurio had in fact applied to LIS programs at the same time he applied to do his first masters degree in English and creative writing. "My decision to undertake the English degrees gave me teaching experience and helped me sustain my interest in library science," he says.
Like Smith, Mercurio plans to do the archives concentration at Simmons and position himself for a research archivist job, one that he hopes will include teaching. In the meantime, he'll continue writing for academic publications, as well as writing short fiction and poetry, which he has done since college.
The Benefits of Experience
Smith and Mercurio took a
preemptive approach to plan B:
They saw an opportunity for a
different career and enrolled in
GSLIS without much, if any,
formal experience in the field.
Christina Gillen '09LS, on the
other hand, worked in and
around school libraries for 15
years before going back to school
to get her master's degree at
GSLIS.
Gillen earned her first master's in broadcasting and film from Boston University in 1975. As a grad student, she worked on a children's television pilot for Spanish-speaking families and interned at a local TV station. Unable to land a job in television when she graduated, she worked in public relations. Gillen, who was by then living in Maryland, took time off to have children and went back to work when they were in elementary school. But rather than return to PR or television, she says, "It made more sense to accept a job offer as an instructional assistant at their school," in part because the work schedule was the same as her kids' class schedule.
Over the years, at a couple of elementary schools, Gillen worked as "lunch duty mom," "go-fer," tutor, director of plays, classroom assistant, and, finally, media assistant in charge of the daily circulation activity in the school library. During her last couple of years in Maryland, she worked at the circulation desk in the county public library system. When Gillen enrolled in GSLIS, "It was a leap of faith since I had not been a student for over 30 years. Turns out the old brain still has plenty of power and juice," she says. Over the summer, Gillen started a new job as a library media specialist at a college preparatory charter school in Colorado, where she works with students from elementary through high school. "I don't think I would be the same librarian if I had not had this journey. My undergraduate degree in drama helps me add pizzazz to my teaching. My experience as a mom helps me understand and relate to the young students," she says. "I have a better tool kit with all the years and jobs. I am more interesting and capable."