 Hello, my name is Kim Doherty and I am the career advisor for the iSchool. And very, very excited to be here with you this evening because what we're going to be talking about is something that I believe is very important for you to be thinking about through the program, throughout your program if you can, but also especially before you're getting ready to launch because our goal is that when you wrap up with that last class, you wrap up your ePortfolio, you maybe have a large drink, you maybe sleep for a week, and then you're going to come to and say, I need to get a job. And we want to make that process for you as easy as possible. So when I talk about creating your career launch plan, what we're going to be talking about is all the things that you want to be doing in order to position yourself to have job opportunities as soon as possible. When you think about your career, and I want to go over a couple of concepts with you before we jump in. The first one is, when you think about your career, it comprises three elements. The first one is what I would call your domain knowledge. And that's basically what you're going to be learning in your grad school program. So every one of the courses that you take is going to broaden and deepen your knowledge of LIS and information skills, which is terrific. The second element of your professional equity is going to be your network. And I'm using network as shorthand for a broader concept, which is basically your community of colleagues, the broad range of all of the people that you have come into contact with and built a relationship with either personal or professional or often both as you've gone through the program and done your assignments and worked with colleagues, fellow students, gotten to know your faculty, gotten to know the administration, done internships, all of those different sorts of things. This becomes the basis from which you build your career network, your professional network, your community of colleagues. Your community of colleagues is going to become critical for you as you go through your career and are looking for seeking new career opportunities. And that's not because you didn't love a job, but you were just ready to make a change, or you had discovered a new passion that you wanted to pursue. The people that you know and that you count as your community of colleagues are going to be the ones that help open up those opportunities for you. The third piece of your professional equity, and this is what you're building over the course of your career, is your professional reputation. And shorthand for professional reputation is your brand. But basically, this is who people think of when they think of you. So I'm going to pick on Jillian because Jillian and I work together. When I think of Jillian, I do not think of someone who is reserved, hesitant, lacking in energy or enthusiasm. Because I've worked with Jillian, I think of Jillian as this incredibly fun, smart, out there, creative, really energizing person to work with. That, for me, is Jillian's brand. And the way that translates for you is if somebody asked me for a reference for Jillian, which I, of course, would be happy to give, they would say, what comes to mind when you think of Jillian's strengths? And I would be able to tell them incredible things about Jillian. As you go through the program, you are going to be building your reputation in a number of different ways. And I'm going to do another workshop on building your brand visibility and your reputation. But for right now, just assume that no matter what you're doing, you are contributing to how people think about you and what they think about you and how they assume you would perform as a coworker. So professional equity is what you want to be working on building all the way through your grad program. You don't want to wait until you've graduated. You want to start working on it now. All right, so laying your groundwork. And again, I was assuming we were all getting ready to graduate at this point. So instead, what I'm going to talk about is a slight spin on this. We're going to talk about how to create an action plan that is a process you can replicate to achieve any goal that you have in your career, in your grad program, in your job hunt, in your life. And that's basically how do you put together a plan to get from here to there? So we're going to look at how to do that. As a process, I'll give you an example that using myself as the guinea pig here, what that looks like. And then we're going to walk through how you would apply that process to you're getting ready to launch or changing a job or developing a new knowledge base or building your network or whatever is important to you in terms of your LIS career. So, okay, here's the process. When you are putting together an action plan, it comprises three elements. The first one is identifying the goal that you are trying to achieve. That's the big thing that you're going after. So for example, your goal is to land an internship at the Library of Congress while you're going through the program. The strategies are sort of the broad actions that you will take to achieve that goal. So what are the things that would have to happen, that you would have to make happen in order to qualify for that internship at the Library of Congress? And then the tactics are the action items within those strategies. So goal is your big thing that you're going for. Strategies are your directions, how you're going to get there. Tactics are within those strategies. What are your action items going to be? And the reason you are looking at that delightful picture of Carl von Klaaswitz there is that he's the guy who came up with this. He was a Prussian military officer who wrote the seminal book on battlefield tactics. And he came up with this concept of goal strategies and tactics. The book he wrote was called On War. And I am happy to tell you that that's all you need to know about it because I actually had to read this book for one of my clients and it's essentially a doorstop. It's huge. So just keep in mind, all you need to think about is goals, strategies and tactics. And now let's put those in play. OK, so two different ways of thinking about this. The first one is creating your plan. And when you create a plan, what you're thinking about is, for your goal, what do I want to accomplish? For your strategies, what kinds of things will help you achieve that goal? And sort of this is sort of like broader thinking of, I'm going to have to accomplish these, say, three things. And we'll use three as an easy number to work with tonight. But basically, your strategies are your major ways of directions of getting to your goal. And then for your tactics, again, what actions are you going to need to take for each one of those strategies? So that means you'd have one goal. You'd have maybe three strategies to achieve that goal. And then you'd have, for each one of those three strategies, maybe three tactics. And again, what we're looking at here is a process for achieving any goal, including getting ready to launch from grad school, in a way that's easy for you to manage. So that was creating our goal, thinking through what it is we're going to need to do and putting that sort of lining that out. But when it comes to executing that action plan that you've just created, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind. And I'm telling you this because as we go through, here are all the things I think you should be doing. I don't want you to become overwhelmed by those and think, holy moly, I can hardly manage my classes and my coursework and I'm working and life is crazy right now. How am I going to fit this all in? And the answer is you're not going to try to do it all at once. And that's the great thing about creating your action plan, is that once you've created it, you know what you need to do. And you can just do it when you have time. When you have bandwidth, when you have a day that, you know, you thought you had four appointments and they all went away, which means you can go back to your action plan and you can see what it is that you need to do and you can pick it up immediately. That's the great thing about having an action plan in place is you don't have to waste time thinking, hmm, if I had a day, what would be a smart thing to do? You've already thought that all through. So when you are executing a plan, the way that I do that is to figure out what it is I'm trying to do and then how do I create the environment around me that enables me to move that forward? And so big things here lower the barriers to act, make it easy to do the things that you have said you're going to do, create the circumstances that enable you to comfortably, consistently do what you're trying to do. And here's an example of that. One of the things I am trying to do these days is to make sure I'm getting regular aerobic exercise. And so I have an elliptical trainer and I was trying to figure out how the heck I was going to get caught up on all of my professional reading because it kind of fell behind. And so I realized, OK, there's time that I can combine two things. If I know I'm going to be on my elliptical trainer for half an hour every morning, I can start reading all of my professional journals up on that little platform thingy while I'm working out. So that is an example of creating an environment that makes it easy for me to accomplish my goal, which is getting through my professional reading. The best book I've ever read on how to achieve goals and how to do what's called behavior modification, which you kind of have to use to achieve your goal is Chip Heath and Dan Heath's book on Switch. And I would would strongly recommend it to you as a great way to make all of your life easier. All right, so here's an example using me as a guinea pig of how I might use goals, strategies and tactics in my own life to achieve something. So here's my goal. I want to become a backup singer for Beyonce. You know, everybody needs to have a stretch goal in life. So that means I'm going to need to be able to do at least these three things in order to achieve that goal. I'm going to have to learn how to sing. I'm going to have to learn how to dance. And then I'm going to have to figure out a way to get Beyonce to hire me. As we all know, all three of these will be challenges. So those are my strategies that will help me achieve my goals. But now each one of those strategies needs a set of tactics that will move me forward to achieve those. So for strategy number one, which is learn how to sing. Here are my tactics. First, interview three singing coaches and choose one within six weeks. And I want you to pay attention to those numbers there. Because when you are designing tactics to accomplish a goal, if at all possible, you want to have them be measurable. How much will you do? How many of whatever's will how many informational interviews will you do within what amount of time? How many questions will you ask during your informational interviews? How many how many professional meetings will you attend? Or webinars will you attend? You want to put numbers to your tactics, if at all possible, because that's sort of how you know you're making the progress that you want to be making. And that's how you know you're going to hit your goal. So as you can see there, I have four tactics that I will use to achieve my learning how to sing. And as a matter of fact, for my I won't say for which birthday, but for a recent birthday, my son gave me a set of drums for my birthday. So I actually have soundproofed my basement so the neighbors aren't killing me. All right, so that was strategy number one. Strategy number two, learn how to dance. OK, so now what are my tactics for that? Well, I'm going to have to find some dance coaches. Choose one. I'm going to sign up for dance lessons. I'm going to practice dancing two hours a day. Of course, that's quite a stretch, but maybe 20 minutes a day. And then most important of all for me is to purchase a back brace and pain meds prior to beginning my dance lessons. So those are my tactics that I will do for achieving my learning how to dance strategy. The big one, figure out how to get Beyonce to hire me. So I really struggled with this, but I think I've come up with good tactics here. So my first one is to knock off her backup singers. The second one, which I read a lot of things about demographics and the new positive aging. So I'm going to explain that hiring me opens up an entirely new market demographic to her. So that's my second tactic. And then the third one is just get right down into it and say, I will pay you double. If you're super bulky, if you'll let me be your backup dancer, and if I fall off the stage, I will triple it. So there is an example of a goal, strategies, and tactics that drive those three strategies forward. All right, now let's take a look at how we're going to do this for you. And I say for your career launch, but this is also what you can be doing while you are in grad school. So our goal is to land a post-graduation LIS job. But depending on where you are in the program, it might also be to land the internship of your dreams. It might be to get a part-time job with the Fashion Institute and Archives while you're going through grad school. It could be anything related to your career. So here's how I would approach this. The first thing is to understand these are my strategies. Understand the responsibilities of the position or the opportunity that you're targeting. Then understand your fit for those responsibilities, which means if you really, really, really want to do an internship at the National Institutes of Health, if you in a previous career have been a medical librarian, you've got a great fit there. You're beautifully aligned. If that's not the case, then maybe you want to take a course in medical librarianship. So that's an example. And then the third strategy is to prepare to get whoever needs to give you the OK to convince them that, yes, they should give you the OK. So again, that could be for a job. It could be an internship. It could be working on a really cool project, even as a volunteer. So now let's look at tactics against those strategies. First one is understanding what it is that the position you're interested in requires. So here are three tactics that you could use to get there. First one is go through the wonderful process. If you haven't done this before, you need to learn how to do it. And if you don't know how to do it, send me an email. And I will send you a guide that I put together. And that is how to do informational interviews. They are one of the most valuable tools in your career development and opening up career opportunities you can possibly imagine. So you would do informational interviews with three people who know something about the organization or the job or the internship or the organization, the archives that you're interested in. You want to talk to people who can tell you more about the opportunity you're interested in. Another way to understand what it would be like to go after this target position is if possible to find similar job descriptions. Now I've tailored this to, again, landing an LAS job when you graduate. And this specifically refers to that. But it's the same thing. If you were looking for an internship in an archives and the archives organization that you were interested in didn't have anything posted, go look at other similar archives and see if they have internships posted and then read what they are saying, how they're describing that so that you have that as background if you were going to pitch this as a potential internship with the archives that you're interested in. The last thing, again, is built around going after a specific job. But it also relates to going after a signature volunteer project, internship, part-time job, whatever. Talk to people, if you can find them, who've held that position previously. One of the things that we'll give you is, is this really the right job for me? If they're telling you or they're not willing to tell you why they left the job, that gives you very, very valuable information. So our first thing is to understand the responsibilities of that target, whatever. And these are three, excuse me, three tactics. You might come up with three completely different ones. Good to go. Second strategy is to understand, as we had mentioned, is to understand your fit for those responsibilities. And that's basically determining how your skills align with that opportunity. And I'll call them opportunities rather than jobs at this point. Another really important piece here is to determine how your soft skills align with the job or the opportunity. Because these days, your domain knowledge is important, but your ability to work collaboratively and effectively and positively with a team and in a team environment is almost critical to being hired or being brought on to any initiative. So you want to look not only at your primary skills, your domain skills, excuse me, but also your soft skills. And then lastly, your last tactic for looking at fit is what we would call a gap analysis. Where do you have gaps between what the opportunity wants or is asking for and what you currently can supply? How you fit with that? And then you can decide how you're going to address any gaps that are there. So that was how you would do tactics for strategy number two. Strategy number three is how you convince a decision maker to bring you on board for that job, for that internship, for that project. Here are the things that I would recommend as your tactics. And this goes especially to anything where you're having to really sell yourself and your ability to do a terrific job. First one is to identify examples of great student or professional work that you have done. The reason this is so important for you to think about now as a student is that as you're going through your program, you're going to have a lot of opportunities to be in a leadership role, say in a student organization, to be the team lead in a group project, to propose a new initiative for the grad program, to work on a cross-disciplinary initiative. When you can say yes to those opportunities, because what you're going to want to do is as you go through grad school, work on as many signature projects or opportunities or initiatives as you possibly can so that you can talk about these and reference these when you are job hunting or when you are going in for that internship interview. The more things you have done that are significant in terms of this was a really cool project or this was a really cool team accomplishment that we had, the easier it is for you to convince people who are decision-makers that you are exactly the kind of person that they're looking for. So that's why I think this tactic is so smart for you to think about not just when you're getting ready to graduate and do job hunting but equally so while you're going through grad school so you can be keeping an eye out for these opportunities and making the most of them. And then the last thing I would say in terms of convincing decision-makers and this goes for both jobs and internships because you are trying to apply for a similar situation which is bring me on board to do this work. I would strongly, strongly suggest that you work with the Career Center's mock interview platform. It's amazing and I'm gonna mention it once more because we have an amazing contact there. All right, so if we sort of put this in a clear, easier to read format, this is what we just walked through. Goals to land a job, the three strategies and then the tactics related to each one of those strategies. These are ones that I just created but as you think through how this would work for you you could have completely different goals, completely different strategies and tactics depending on what it is that you want to achieve. The important thing to understand here is that this process of organizing your action plan can be replicated over and over again to help you accomplish literally any goal that you are trying to reach. All right, so just to recap, identify your goal, what are you trying to accomplish? Your strategies and your tactics and again, this doesn't have to be just professional. It can be your goal is to move to a new community, to move from the Bay Area to Anchorage, Alaska. So you'd be looking at a huge lifestyle change. This could help you figure out how do I make this change personally and professionally and organize it so that the leap is comfortable and enjoyable for you. All right, so that's the process. Now what we're going to go through is your pre-launch checklist. And again, for those of you who are graduating shortly this can be how you get ready to hit the ground running so that you don't graduate and then think, aha, now I have to think about getting a job. We wanna get you there sooner. But on the other hand, also if you are a student in the program and you're not close to graduating all of these things are equally applicable to what you're doing as you go through the program. You can be building these all the way through the program. Remember those three areas of what you know, who you know and who knows what about you. This all relates to those three areas of professional equity. All right, so the first thing is to make sure that you have secured or strengthened key relationships. Those could be relationships with faculty that you really, really liked and admired and had sort of a bond with. And if you're uncomfortable reaching out to your faculty members and just saying, I'd like to stay in touch after I graduate, almost every faculty member that I've ever known and certainly the ones at San Jose State who are some of the most student focused faculty I've ever seen, if you say I'd like to stay in touch they'll be jazzed that you do want to. And so don't hesitate to reach out to any faculty member and say, is it okay for us to connect on LinkedIn? And is it okay if I check in with you now and then just let me know how things or let you know how things are going in my career. Most faculty members would be absolutely thrilled and they then become part of your professional community of colleagues. Because remember, as soon as you graduate and become a working LIS professional regardless of where you are in your career, you're a peer, you will be my peer when you graduate. We're on the same footing. And so I would encourage you to think of yourself as professionals in training rather than students and prepare to think about what you're doing along those lines. Next one is to vet your professional reputation and visibility. And the primary way of doing that is online. And here's why. When you apply for a job, the first thing that a hiring manager is going to do is look at your application and then check you out online. If they don't find anything about you online, they're gonna think you're very odd because life just doesn't work that way anymore. And it makes it very easy for them to toss your resume or your application. And you don't want that to happen. So you want to run your name through your favorite search engine and you wanna see what comes up. You want to make sure that one of the things that comes up is a dynamite LinkedIn profile. And we have some information about LinkedIn in the career development section. We also have some terrific resources for you on how to do that if you're thinking, oh my God, no, not LinkedIn. Don't panic, it's okay. But you do want to have what I would call online marketing materials out there speaking to your strengths 24 seven because when somebody looks you up, you want them to find killer information about you. So look to see what comes up when someone searches for you online. This is gonna be kind of tough, but in order to keep you from going just flat out crazy, I would encourage you to try to narrow down your job hunting focus to three career paths. So for example, I'm interested in working in healthcare for a for-profit healthcare company. I'm interested in working in reference for a public library. I'm interested in instructional design in whatever area instructional design jobs are flourishing, which is basically everywhere. If you narrow things down to only three paths, and of course you wanna do probably the three things that intrigue you the most, it will enable you to focus on a manageable amount of information. One of the challenges about going through any LIS program is that you will get about three-fourths of the way through and realize, hot damn, there are 400 different things I'd like to do with my LIS skills. Which one should I get a job in? The great news is that just to alleviate some pressure here, your first job is only your first job. And so whatever your first job is, is just whatever your first job is. And then once you get that first foot in the door, you start building your career and you go over here and then you go over here, no job that you have at any point in your career precludes you from doing a pivot into that other thing you'd been thinking about doing when you graduated and now you're thinking that would really be fun and now it's 10 years into my career and I've enjoyed what I'm doing but I'm really wanting to try that other thing as well. You can do that. So when I'm telling you to narrow it down to three initial things that doesn't preclude any of the other of those 400 things that you want to do, it's just saying let's just get you started from a manageable position. So if you're a student still going through your program, one of the things I'm suggesting that you do is sort of constantly have this back and forth with yourself of is this one of the three things that intrigues me enough that I would like to learn more about it? I would like to do more of this kind of work is metadata absolutely fascinating to me. What about digital asset management? What about special collections? Because if you start thinking about this now, you can start using informational interviews and your assignments to start sort of vetting your assumptions and exploring a bit. So this is a way of learning more about what your options are, not having to commit to any of them but just sort of reflecting on them and saying, what do I think? And the more I learn about this, is it even more engaging to me and more intriguing or was that enough? And I think so I'll go into something else. The reason I'm harping on this, harping, the reason I'm emphasizing this is because again, I don't want you to panic or feel overwhelmed as you go through the program and realize there are so many different things you can do with your skill set. That really is the great news. And coming from someone who has used my LIS degree in a gazillion different ways and had gazillions of different jobs, it's more fun than you can imagine and it's incredibly rewarding. So yeah, it's great, but we'll start you with three jobs and I'll help you move forward through those when that time comes. The last thing is to prepare your marketing materials. If you are a student still going through the program for a while, get your LinkedIn profile up now. I did an article at one point on headlines that LIS students could use in their LinkedIn profiles that didn't say San Jose State, high school grad student. You don't want to say that. You want to say something more compelling like students totally engaged in my love of genre fiction or my love of data management, data science, whatever. So if you're ready to start working on your LinkedIn profile, send me an email. By the way, I'll have my email at the end of this and I will send you that article to help you get started. That said, I want to point out the bottom of this slide. Your best friend in the world is our secret weapon, Kerry McKnight. Kerry is the grad student's liaison for the career center and she loves the iSchool program. She loves our students. She loves hearing from all of you. She knows how to do all of the cool stuff at the career center, but she's an absolute whiz at resumes, cover letters and LinkedIn profiles, which all of us struggle with. They're hard to do. So if you are to the point where you want to work on your LinkedIn profile or a resume or a cover letter, you've got Kerry McKnight's information, her contact information there. I'm the person who can help you figure out sort of your career and career strategies and career paths and those kinds of things. But when it comes to your marketing materials, which would be your LinkedIn profile, resume, career cover letter, Kerry is just dynamite. Kerry is also your tuition dollars at work. So you want to make sure to take advantage of that while you can and Kerry will be thrilled to help you as I mentioned. Okay, what else? You want to do your job hunting research now rather than waiting until you're ready to graduate or until you have graduated because the better prepared you are to make a move, to send in an application, to reach out to someone, to do whatever. If you can be ahead of everybody else who graduates and then is just thinking, aha, now I have to look for a job, you will beat all the competition out, which is what you want to do. So I would say, don't wait. If you're going to graduate now this summer or spring, don't wait to start applying for jobs. Start applying for them now, saying I am soon to graduate. Give a graduation date. Most hiring managers, if they look at your application and they think, wow, this is just the person we want or wow, this might really be the person we're looking for, if you say I will be available within two months, they'll probably wait. They'll be willing to work with you. So you want to start doing your job hunting research now so you can get those applications out there well before it's time to graduate. You want to beef up your interviewing skills and again, Carrie is your friend. They have got really cool tools at the Career Center to help you with all of these different kinds of interviews. As we know right now, it's a lot of it is phone interviews and video interviews and that is sort of disoriented for everyone involved. So I would encourage you to check in with Carrie and have her sort of coach you through this and tell you what you need to be thinking about and how to prepare for these in ways that you might not have been thinking about otherwise. And then most important, not most important, but very important, if you are in professional associations as a student and if you're not, every one of you needs to join a professional LIS association while you're a student because they have these incredible student discounts. And that gives you the opportunity to look at the entire membership list and that can be very valuable when you're looking for people to interview. So if you are, first of all, if you're not in a professional association, I would say join the association of your choice now and then second, you wanna renew it the day before you graduate because it allows you to get that student discount one more time. So next, I would strongly recommend this because this is an obstacle that is very difficult to overcome if you are thinking about working in a public school or academic library. That is that you try, if at all possible, to get in some type of work in a professional library setting. So depending on what you're interested in doing, working part-time in a school library, working part-time or remotely for an academic library, doing whatever, working part-time or volunteer or doing whatever work for a public library. That's sort of the cutoff line when jobs are competitive and hiring managers are looking at who to hire. If they are looking at an application from someone who's had no library experience whatsoever, it can be challenging to get a job. That doesn't mean that you can't get a job. LA Public Library will actually recruit and train people who have not worked in the library before, especially if you have retail experience. But it's just so, so much easier for you if you can have done an internship somewhere that you can talk about or point to or have volunteered. Paid work is the best, but if it's not possible to line up paid work and sometimes quite frankly, it just isn't. See if there's anything you can do remotely. See if there are any projects that you can help them with that they haven't been able to get to before. There's a thing called the student halo, which is when you are a student, almost anyone in the LIS profession will talk to you. They will respond to your emails. They will, excuse me, take phone calls from you. They will answer all your questions and they will be happy to do so. That's just the nature of this profession. So you wanna take advantage of that as much as you can while you're in the program, while you can still say, I'm a student in the San Jose iSchool program. Once you graduate, people are somewhat suspect and think perhaps you are reaching out to them because you're not really looking for an informational interview. You're actually sort of trying to sneak in a job application here and you're actually going to really be applying for a job. So they're much less open to talking to you. Once you get a job, they'll talk to you for hours, but it's the whole, I'm unemployed, I'm not a student. That situation makes them a little bit nervous. So take advantage and build your connections, build your visibility, build your domain knowledge and do all that research and do your informational interviews. Vet your assumptions about various career paths while you're still a student, if you can. Another thing is to help people help you. When you graduate, people will know that you're looking for a job and most people who know you and like you, I assume, will wanna help you with that, but they can't help you unless you tell them very specifically, this is the help that I need. So for example, are you looking for someone who's worked in the Gilead corporate library so that you can talk to them? Are you looking for someone who has been a school librarian so that you can talk to them about the various school districts in California and what it's like to work in them? Are you looking for someone who has a connection to a hiring manager in a public library? When you let people know I'm getting ready to graduate, I'm gonna be looking for a job, tell them how they can help you because if they don't know, they won't be able to do it and so they can't help you. Part of that is being able to articulate your value proposition and your value proposition is what is going to convince a hiring manager that they want to hire you rather than everybody else that they've interviewed. One of the conversations that Dr. Hirsh and I had once with a number of Bay Area library directors was about the fact that they were having people come in who were recent graduates, not necessarily the San Jose program, but just MLIS programs in general, who would not be able to say why you should hire them. They would, these new graduates would come in and the hiring manager would say, why should we hire you? And the new grad would say, well, I always wanted to work in a library and I think I would be a good librarian and sort of like that. You don't wanna be able, you don't wanna do that. You wanna be able to say, I would be a great asset for this organization, I believe, because here's what my strengths are and this is what you have said you're looking for in the job. You also wanna be able to talk about why you're interested in that organization. So you want to, before you start actually talking about specific jobs with potential hiring managers, you wanna be able to say what it is you're good at and why that is a value. All right, so with that, I hope I haven't overwhelmed all of you and I'm going to open it up to questions. Now, I don't think I've seen any questions come through. I'm looking in the chat box. So, oh, I just saw 70 messages. Let me see what happens here. Oh, Jillian is saying that Carrie is amazing. Absolutely, all right. Okay. All right, so first of all, if you have a question, if you would either unmute yourself and ask it or, and I'm looking in two different directions so I just realized this must seem really weird because I've got your videos over here and I've got your chat room over here. If you would let me know what your questions are, I would be happy to have you to answer them and or I would be happy to respond to an email just coming out with a question, something that we've talked about tonight that you have a question about that I can help you with now or six months from now or right as before you're getting ready to graduate. I'm here to help you and I love to do it. All right, so I have a question from Robin. Do you have any advice for those who are transitioning from a different industry into library and information science? And Robin, that is a terrific question because so many people come into this profession from a different profession. So basically what you're trying to, you're trying to do two things. You are trying to transfer the skill set that you had in your previous profession into the LIS universe. So for example, if what you did before was maintain all of the records for all of the inventory in a retail setting, that's actually records management. So half of it is learning and Ingrid, I'll get you next, half of it is learning how to translate what a previous skill was into LIS language. Carrie can help you do some of that and I can help you do some of it as well. So that's the first thing is that skills transfer. Second thing is you are going to need to build a bridge or a platform into the LIS community because assume that you've built up visibility and a community in your previous career, now you're gonna need to do that again in the LIS profession. And the easiest ways to do that are again to get to know and build relationships with your fellow students, with your instructors and by having professional memberships. So join the, if you're in California, join the Colorado, no, California, sorry, Association of Libraries and volunteer. Get on committees, get to know people and have them get to know you because when you do that, they no longer think of you as Robin, the person who is this other thing, they start thinking of you as Robin who is a part of our professional community. So a lot of it is just building that visibility and building those connections from scratch, really, in the LIS profession. So great question, Robin. And if you want more feedback on that, give me a holler and we can brainstorm it some more. Okay, Ingrid, for someone new to the program, can you talk about information? Okay, do you recommend, yes, a friend of him finds out if you're starting the program and says, I have a friend who works at Yale, Yale. Okay, I would do them right now. Ingrid is basically saying, when do you start doing informational interviews? And I would say, as soon as you identify an interest that you have, like as soon as you hear somebody in your class mention special collections and you think, huh, I wonder what it would be like to work in special collections. You wanna do some research about what special collections are and what special collection librarians do. And then once you feel like you have a basic level of knowledge and understanding about that area, then you start reaching out and asking for informational interviews. What you don't wanna do is ask questions in an informational interview that you could easily find out on your own through just a little bit of background research because that then kind of is wasting that other person's time. But as I said, I've written up a guide that I think sort of outlines how to do that and how to ask for an informational interview and what questions are kind of questions that will help you figure out how to approach this. And Ingrid, if you want more information about that, give me a holler, we'll follow up. Okay, for Corey, for students who are also working full-time, how do they balance an internship and a job? How have students done this in the past? This is the huge, huge ongoing question. Some students have taken vacation time to do like a two-week internship. Other students have identified internships they could do remotely. So they could work it in sort of around their work and schoolwork. Other students have taken a semester off or decided to only do one course rather than two or whatever. So they could work an internship in. It is not easy under any circumstances. It's also something that you might want to ask other students about who you discover are doing internships, asking them how they're doing those. A lot of it depends, especially now, on whether or not you can do it remotely and that is more and more the case with internships. Okay, Erin had a community college where I previously attended contact. Okay, contact me about an internship course they were offering this semester. They connect you with a site. Should I utilize this opportunity? That's an interesting question, Erin. And here's how I would evaluate this. So I'm assuming that this is not, this would not be focused on information work if it's through a community college. I'm not sure it would be worth it to you to, if that's the case, I would say it wouldn't be worth it for you to do an internship because it wouldn't give you attraction in a hiring situation if you weren't working in a library kind of environment. I would also question whether or not you would have to pay them. You might want to talk to an academic advisor about that and see how that fits into the iSchool internship requirements. Interesting question. Okay, Toby, is it possible to get an internship from those posted before reaching 18 credits? That I don't know. The person to ask that question to would probably be Dr. Mayne, Dr. Linda Mayne. She would be able to answer that for you and I'm sorry that I don't have the answer to it. Okay, okay, follow up from Erin. It was a library technician program. In that case, if they were gonna place you in a library, and you could work it in, it might be worth doing just to get your foot in the door in a library setting. I can't emphasize enough how important it is if at all possible to have some library experience before you graduate. So Toby, excuse me, Erin, I would say if you thought that was the only opportunity that you would have to be in a library setting, it might be worth doing so that you could have that on your resume. I'm just not sure how it would count with the iSchool program. So that might be a question. All right, so I'm now running overtime for you and I appreciate all of your patience. So with that, I will wrap up for the evening. It's been delightful talking with you and I appreciate all of you being so patient as we go through this. And again, I'm here for you. I'm here to help you and make it as easy as possible for you to excel in the program and to have a career that you love as much as I love my Elias career and have loved it for many, many, many years, too many to mention. So with that, I will say I hope you all have a wonderful evening and don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions.