Funny Spin on the Advice to Job-Seekers

My friend Libby passed this on to me – not sure if it’s one of those things that’s gone around the internet before, but I thought it was hilarious.

Hxxxx A. Mxxxx
Chair – Search Committee
412A College Hall, XYZ University
College Town, US 11000

Dear Professor Mxxxx,

Thank you for your letter of March 16. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department.

This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals.

Despite XYZ’s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at this time. Therefore, I will assume the position of assistant professor in your department this August. I look forward to seeing you then.

Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.

Sincerely,
CXXX L. Jxxxx

Oh, how I would love to meet the person who had the gumption enough to actually send this! I’m sure it at least gave the search committee a laugh, if not cold sweats.

An Open Letter to Job-Seekers, Updated for 2007

Way back in 2004, I was on a search committee which, I can only assume, ended up hiring a librarian. Honestly – I can’t remember what position it was for, but since I adored everyone who I worked with at my last job, we most likely hired someone absolutely fantastic.However, that experience led to a bit of a rant, entitled An Open Letter to Job-Seekers. I encourage you to read it, ponder it, and then come back here to read a few updates for 2007.

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Are you back? Great.

As I think about how I could update that letter, I’m struck by how incredibly relevant all the advice I gave in that rant still is. At MPOW, we recently had some of those elusive entry-level openings – and we got the applications to prove it! The candidate pool was really strong, which tells me that there may be a few things going on these days in librarianship:

1. We are graduating too many people from library schools who want to work in academia. (Another rant for another day – and I admit that I’m as guilty as the next enthusiastic librarian in recruiting people to the profession when the market is like this…)
2. The people who are going into librarianship now have very clear reasons for doing so, and are working hard before, during, and after graduate school to make sure their experience will eventually help them find the job they want.

So given those things, what advice can I give you now that’s different from then? A few nuggets of wisdom, gleaned mostly from the part of the search before search committees even decide who they want to consider as the top third of the candidate pool:

• If your classmates are all a bunch of dips and are applying for the same jobs you are, you’re coming to the job search from a disadvantaged position. In that case, you MUST figure out how to stand out from two crowds – that of your school (association is a bitch) and that of the entire candidate pool. Consider this when making a decision about where to go (if you can). Talk to recent grads of the schools you’re interested in and find out if they and their classmates are whip-smart, or a few crayons short of a 64-pack. If you’re limited by geography and all of a sudden get that sinking feeling about the school in your area, consider one of the fine distance education programs out there.
• Being fluent in technology is no longer a preferred or optional qualification. If a job ad asks specifically for technology skills, please don’t talk to me about how you can search DIALOG. I don’t care if you can search DIALOG; search is no longer a “technology”. What I care about is if you can understand how RSS works and why it might be important in libraries. I care if you can get into code (html or xml) and poke it and fix it. I care that you bloody well understand that relational databases can be incredibly powerful and infuriatingly limiting all at the same time. I care that you are excited about the prospect of learning about these things if you don’t know much about them yet.
• PDF people, PDF. Don’t upload your resume into the online application system as a Word document, but rather send it as a PDF. Why? I’ll tell you why. I prefer to see things in Word in page layout view, 75%, with spellcheck and grammar check both turned on. When you prefer to work in normal view, 150%, with grammar check off and I open your resume/cover letter in that view, it jars me. I have to adjust it until I can read it. Then I get to look at all sorts of green squiggle lines (resumes + grammar check = nightmare) and red squiggle lines (Word hate names, acronyms, and misspellings.) If you simply save your resume and cover letter as a PDF, we have no such issues. The other thing I’d suggest you do before PDFing it is to put your resume and cover letter into ONE word document, and then save that as a PDF. Name it something easy, like YourName-CollegeName.pdf. See how that works for both of us (and your references, to whom you will send your resume, cover letter, and the job ad)?
• Speaking of, please, for the love of God, be careful about who you ask to be your references! And do them the favor of sending your cover letter, resume, and the job ad when you apply for the position, perhaps also with a personal word or two about what excites you about the position. It will serve you well in the long run to ask someone who is articulate and organized to serve as your reference. Note that this means you may have to avoid asking your “absent-minded professor” types. This underscores the advice I gave in 2004 about getting as much relevant experience as you can, even if it’s not in libraries. That way you diversify your potential reference pool.

So for now, that’s it. Good luck job-seekers of 2007! I am so happy you decided to become librarians. It’s a great profession and I know (the bulk of) you will keep us moving in the right direction.

Seattle’s Best

No no, not the coffee. I spent last weekend in Seattle for the ALA Midwinter meeting. After praying a little half-heartedly for a blizzard to strand me on the East Coast, I sucked it up and realized that a.) I actually really tend to enjoy the conferences once I get there and b.) I wanted to see my friends from … well, everywhere! Unfortunately, I only ran into one of my LSU Ex-Pats buddies since I didn’t get in till almost midnight Friday (we normally have dinner/drinks on Friday evening). However, I did see Beth and lots of folks from Swarthmore (although somehow I missed out on talking with Meg more… boo hiss!) And then I got to catch up with all my friends from WSS – Kelly and Piper and Jane and Heather and Jennifer and Diana and Jennifer and Rebecca and Cynthia and on and on and on. I can’t believe how much fun I have with these women – people I never would have met if it hadn’t been for the American Library Association and its annoying requirements that anyone who is on a committee must attend both the annual and midwinter meetings. So over the course of many years, if you stick around in the same section, you get to know people. And I like these people – a lot! I also like how each year someone new shows up and gets sucked into the fold. I’m hoping that happened this year with a couple of people.

Besides being in Seattle and walking around a lot, I ate some good food, went to a bona fide lesbian bar (with the WSS folks, even though they’re definitely not all playing on that team), and spent a lot of time in Pike’s Place Market trying to avoid the impending headaches that invariably come when I’m in places like that (I wasn’t successful – thank god for figuring out what OTC drugs keep my headaches from turning down the twisted path into migraine-land.)

Lest you think that all I did was socialize, I’ll have you know that I had a ton of meetings to attend, and spent several hours on the exhibit floor. Of course, I managed to mostly pick up advance reader’s copies of 18 (yes, eighteen) books this conference. I think that’s a record for me, and I’m not sure I’m completely proud of it. (My dratted cell phone won’t let me send the photo I took in my hotel room.  Suffice to say that the photo of all 18 books is funny). But hey – free books! I’ve already finished three of them (Summer at Tiffany, Bad Monkeys, and The Knitting Circle) and started the fourth this mornings (A Perfect Mess). I love getting to read books before they’re released to the general public. Often times I pick up books I wouldn’t give a second thought to in the bookstore and end up enjoying them immensely and passing them on to people I think would like them. Water for Elephants was one I picked up last year and passed around to about 10 folks at work.

So this year I’m trying to figure out how I can finagle going to BookExpo America. It’s right at the end of May in NYC and doesn’t cost all that much for a librarian’s one-day pass. I’m thinking that even if they don’t give out the number of advance reader’s copies that they do at ALA, it would be an educational experience.  Have any of you ever attended?  What were your experiences?

My assessment of Seattle: thumbs-up!  I’d go there again in a heartbeat and would love to see a lot more of the city than the area I could during this conference.

20 things I like about my job: a list

1. the folks in my department are a hoot
2. the students ask really neat questions
3. my office rocks
4. the planning initiative
5. interviewing people
6. teaching fun classes (living city in film and women + memoir are two recent faves)
7. the folks in other departments are a hoot too
8. did i mention that the students are really smart?
9. and that my office overlooks about a million trees?
10. thursday “office hours” with the simpson folks
11. they let me play hockey with the college club team
12. food from el table (student-run cafe) (yummmmy grilled cheese, tomato, and avocado on 12-grain bread….)
13. a gorgeous campus
14. i don’t commute to work, i drive
15. my boss is pretty darn awesome
16. the students (yeah, again)
17. the change – current and future
18. (i hate to admit this) the incredible furniture on the first floor of the library (not the lime green tongue chairs, but the rust-colored womb chairs, which i COVET)
19. the varied nature of my work, from daily to management to project to professional
20. the people i work with and for

Yes, coming here was a good move. Amy and I debated for a few days about whether to make the leap or not, and there were a couple of moments after we got here when I second-guessed the decision (usually during the nearly-hour-long commute I had to our then-apartment in Jamaica Plain). But now that I’m 10 months into it, settled into our home just 5 minutes from campus, and settled into a life routine, it’s really obvious to me that I’ve made a good choice professionally and personally. I can’t wait to see what the next 10 months bring.

Egads!

Has it really been almost a month since my last post? My apologies. Life’s been plugging along quite nicely, although as per usual this past year, it’s been busy!

I finished both the wristlets and the hat. Love them. Wear them almost every day, even though it’s not quite winter weather yet. I am a dork, I know it. But I really like them.

I started a sweater – for me! It’s Janda from an older issue of Knitty. I got the yarn (Peruvian Highland Wool) a couple of years ago from Elann.com, and thought it felt like the right time to jump in. So far I’ve finished the back and have begun the front. I think sleeve island is going to be a lot longer than normal on this one, since the sleeves are raglan. But so far it’s a pretty easy, mindless knit, and I like that. The body is the lighter color, and the sleeves are the darker. I’m using a light tan/off-white for the racing stripes up the sleeves.

My folks came to visit Amy and me at our new house. We had a very nice time – ate a few great meals (Chiara, Oga’s, Union Oyster House), toured campus, drug them to our hockey game (we won!), and watched a bit of baseball in the down times. Just lovely. Can’t wait to see them again at Thanksgiving.Work has been really interesting lately. We’re down a couple of people in my department, which always makes things interesting. Plus there are some interesting division-wide conversations happening that excite me, and that have the potential to make my job a lot more interesting. The decision to come here? Get a thumbs-up. (Although I still my my friends in Philly and at Swat.)

I’m quite sad that I’m missing this year’s Internet Librarian conference. The blog posts I’m reading have me green with envy. Maybe next year (along with ALA Midwinter and Annual, ACRL, and whatever other cool, fun, relevant conferences I can rustle up.)

Things that have caught my eye for one reason or another lately:

• LibStats
• Katha Pollitt
• BostonChefs.com

That’s all for now. Happy Halloween!