Tag Archives: jobhunt

12.08.31 [Friday]
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games, library, school, travel, vancouver, winnipeg

i have a new job (on vancouver island)

Today I finish up my last bit of work for my MLIS degree (my professional experience moderating TeenRC.ca) and a couple of hours ago I got a phone call offering me a job as a librarian in Campbell River BC, out on Vancouver Island. It’s been a good day.

So Campbell River is a small town on the eastern side of the island. The branch there is a hub for five surrounding very small libraries whose collections we also manage. My job is as a Children’s/Youth librarian and they really want to develop their teen programming and services so I’m being given an almost blank slate to be working with. They already have a Teen Advisory Council set up, and my boss is really proud of the teens up there. So it should be a good time.

The branch is small and I’ll get on-desk time covering both Adult and Children’s services, which is great. I know that another library in the library system does D&D nights so there’s precedent for me to get some gaming into this library if the members are into that.

Morning ferry

I’ve never lived in a small town before so we’ll see how that part of everything works, but it’ll be somewhere new and hopefully means I’ll have more to write about. It’s going to be so nice to unsubscribe from all my jobfeeds.

Thank you everyone who’s been nice to me while I’ve been kind of down this summer. I’ve complained a lot about the soul-grinding nature of jobhunting, but I have been lucky enough to get interviews, and now I’m going into full-time work. Which is weird. My plan is to save money for doing the Trans-Siberian trip in the next couple of years since I’ll be making money and won’t be in a big city to spend it.

A week from today I’m going to go to Winnipeg for a week. It’s been a year and a half since I was there for my grandma’s funeral. I planned this a while ago as a break from the accursed hunt, but now it’ll be much more fun without my lack of income to pay October’s rent looming.

I’ll also try to write more now that I’m no longer wasting all my energy on cover-letters.

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12.08.06 [Monday]
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games, travel, vancouver

update for my mom to show her i am not dead

This past week it felt like everyone went off on exciting roadtrips. Except me. I’m still here applying for jobs in many places. There are two really interesting jobs in Toronto I applied for, and there’s a lot of appeal in packing up all my stuff in a U-Haul and driving it across the country. But then it’d be another round of getting to know a new place and finding friends and all of that, which I am getting a little tired of. I’m applying for jobs here too. I know people who’ve gotten jobs here straight out of SLAIS. It is possible.

Last week I learned to play Agricola (emphasis on the GRIK with a short I sound) and croquet. I was accused of being a hipster when I enthused about croquet. Which I found a little odd because I was actually enthused, not ironically-jaded-enthused. Maybe I’ve misunderstood hipsterdom completely.

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12.07.30 [Monday]
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library, school, vancouver, whining

job hunting (or: a quarter of my waking life)

I have not been posting much this month because I have become crazy busy with my last bit of school and with trying unsuccessfully to find a job. Last year I got a co-op job really easily so I guess I shouldn’t be complaining too much yet.

But man, there were 50 applicants for a Casual Children’s Librarian position. Casual. No guaranteed hours. I got an interview for that job, my only one so far in Vancouver, and I kind of sort of knew the head of Youth Services there. The job went to someone with much more experience than me. Because there are so many librarians out there looking for work.

I knew this would suck, but I thought I was pretty good at this librarian thing and I’d be okay. I still hope that. In 2006 it was four months before I got my job at the library, which wasn’t so bad. But my rent then was a third of what I pay now.

Since I don’t actually have to live anywhere specific, it’s going to be increasingly stupid for me to stay in Vancouver with no income. I wish I’d been able to live here as an employed person. It probably would have been more fun. Though it’s not like anywhere else is some librarian promised land. (I have applied in Calgary.)

I figure that once this month of too much work is done I guess I’ll start looking at jobs in the land of no healthcare and shittier wages. I have enough airmiles to do two North American return flights so I could even do a couple of non-Skype interviews before traversing the continent. Hooray.

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12.07.05 [Thursday]
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library, sports, vancouver

hard not hardly

So I’ve been back in Vancouver a week and been busy busy busy. I have a lot of stuff to do every day, transcribing the interviews I did out east, keeping up with the Teen Reading Club stuff and getting paid to work on elearning videos. It’s funny how the last one is the hardest to get to and that’s the one that actually brings in money. I guess part of it is that I’ve also got to keep those hours down and it’s entirely possible for me to get lost in editing video until the world ends. If I’m judicious about when I start that kind of thing it means I’ll be able to juggle the less fun work too.

Sean and Jenn were in town last weekend and though I didn’t get to spend as much time with them as I’d have liked we did have a good sports day (baseball and football) followed by a science morning. I had never been to Science World, though that golfball building has been my iconic image for Vancouver since I was six. It was a lot of fun. The DaVinci exhibit, filled with replicas of devices made from his notebooks, was there and we wandered slowly through. It was the part of Science World where we had to elbow the fewest kids out of the way. They had a whole room dedicated to blown up pictures of the Mona Lisa, all colour-corrected and infra-red viewed, but my favourite part was the actual sized replica of the back of the painting. There’s an inexplicable H and other scrawls. Even though it’s not the real thing, it felt good seeing something new.

I’m applying for jobs. There’s a great Community Outreach Librarian job in Calgary that came up that I really want. A similar one went up in Edmonton too. And there are positions open in the public library back in Sydney. I doubt I’d get any of those, since they probably aren’t going to be as trusting of a Skype interview as a techy place like Prosentient was, but I’m applying. And I’ll keep applying here in Vancouver. It just feels like here everything is so temporary. There’s a great job that I could maybe get for a year but then I’d have to find a new job when a year is up. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world. Flexibility is a virtue and all that.

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12.05.25 [Friday]
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library, vancouver

first (and not last) jobhunt disappointment

A while back I applied for a Children’s Librarian job far from Vancouver in a much rougher place than here. Last week people from the library called and scheduled a phone interview, which meant I started to get a bit excited. On Wednesday I had the interview and I felt like it went really well. I never had to talk out of my depth, I was excited about the possibilities coming up at the library. In my head I was figuring out how the logistics of moving to this far-off place would work and how little Vancouver time I might have left. I was thinking about cool programs I could be running for the kids up there, and what a great job that would be.

I should know better than to want anything ever. I have a way better track record at getting things I don’t really care about.

So yeah, I didn’t get this job. Which is good because it means I’m not leaving Vancouver anytime soon. The crappiness of it is that I applied out there thinking it would be a less competitive situation. Jobs here in the lower mainland put me at the throats of practically all my librarian friends (note that we’re all very nice about the job competition so far and all the throats are more conceptual background thoughts than anything literal) and even more qualified people. Here, I’ll only be able to get the job that I’m absolutely perfect for, I feel.

But them’s the breaks and I’ll keep applying for things. One of my friends just highlighted a job in Kelowna that would be pretty good for me, and I’ve got applications in at a few libraries around here that it’s possible I’ll hear some word on soon.

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12.03.19 [Monday]
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comics, music, school

march is not a terrible month

It was my birthday last week though I didn’t do anything special for it. Earlier in the week I went to see Fred Penner perform at UBC. I went with library school classmates and afterwards Jamie and Nicholle got him to sign their ukeleles. I didn’t join in the picture taking because I’ve seen Fred Penner in enough situations over the years where he’s just another guy (high school, Quinzmas, church) that treating him like a celebrity seemed weird.

Getting close to being done my homework for the term. My best assignment is undoubtedly my book trailer (see above) but I’ve had a few other things to finish as well. I saw a sentence on my Twitterfeed the other day saying “If you aren’t doing something you love, you’re wasting your time” In no way did I feel I was wasting my time making that video. The rest of my homework is not quite so inspiring.

I’ve applied for a job in New York to be a librarian at DC Comics, which would be crazy neat. It’d be a special library where I’d help research the first appearance of minor characters and do interlibrary loans with the studios in Burbank. It’d be a bit different from being a teen librarian but it’d be all sorts of cool. Probably won’t get it, but would have kicked myself for ages if I hadn’t applied.

And it gave me a reason to talk to people at the comic publisher booths when Jamie and I head down to Emerald City Comic Con in a couple of weeks. I wonder what kind of library a place like Oni or Dark Horse has, and how they get used. I’m the kind of person who can’t just go up to people and start talking, but having a real question I’d like to answer will be a way to kick myself into it.

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12.01.24 [Tuesday]
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journalism, library, school, tech, vancouver

a job i am totally applying for

Today, moments after I hung up from Skyping with my mom, I found a job I really want. I mention Skyping with my mom because in that conversation I’d been talking about how when I graduate I’ll be looking for work all over the place, and how one of the upsides of being unattached is being able to be mobile, and all that jazz, but also how I’d only try working in the U.S. if it was a great job. We talked about places I’d be more or less interested in. At no point in this conversation did Alaska come up.

Of course, Alaska is where this job I found is.

But I think I’d be a pretty excellent New Media Producer for the Juneau NPR affiliate. Here’s a snippet of the job description:

… an individual with experience and skills in journalism and online content management, including writing and editing for the web, graphic design and site management.

I could completely do that. And do that really well. And it would actually integrate my journalism side with my digital librarianish side (you know, content management kinds of things).

Anyway, I’m putting together an application for them. It’s probably a bit of a long shot (I am a foreigner and all), and it’d mean I’d have to finish my MLIS with a couple of web-delivered courses (which wouldn’t be a big deal), but it could be neat.

Sorry this didn’t happen an hour before you called, Mom. I might have been more excitable.

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11.07.14 [Thursday]
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australia, photography

tracking (far from the outback)

Holly’s very into the jobhunt. They do this whole “job trial” thing here which is deeply annoying. They keep on bringing her into places for a few hours to work and then don’t call her back. Kind of a dick move. But it’s a big city and there are lots of people looking for work I guess. She’s pretty awesome about keeping on going even though it’s tough.

Today she went on an hour train ride north and back as part of this whole process. I can’t tell you why, or what she returned with, but I can post this picture she took from the train.

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