 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the San Jose State University School of Information Career Webcast. This is Jill Kleese, your iSchool Career Center liaison. I will be your moderator tonight, so thank you very much for joining me. We have a great pleasure to have Sally Gore with us tonight who is a research evaluation analyst for the University of Massachusetts Center for Clinical and Translational Science. So that is quite a title. Sally is a skills expert who will share with you how to inventory your own skills and apply them to LIS jobs. Tonight's session is one hour, and it is being recorded. You can find recordings to past career webcasts on the SJSU School of Information's YouTube channel under Career Development Webcasts. So we're going to go ahead and get started. So I'm going to hand it off to you, Sally, so take it away. Thanks, Jill. Thanks, everyone. I trust everyone can hear me okay, and if not, you can type something in that box and I'll see it, and we'll try to correct it. Thanks for the invitation and thanks for being here this evening, and we'll have a little chat for a bit and some time for Q&A and maybe a bit of a discussion. So what I want to talk about tonight is, as Jill was saying, how to kind of inventory your skills and what we know in terms of working with information and how those skills translate to different areas within the library and outside of the library. I had a career down for a dozen years or so, and the majority of it was working within an academic health sciences library, and in the last two years I'm still at an academic medical center, educational center, but I don't work in the library anymore, so I'll talk a little bit about how that all came together. But what I want you to think about, as we're talking tonight, depending upon where you are in your educational career or the blending of your already working and getting education, people come from different aspects into the librarianship, I know. But what do you, what I want you to think about as we start is what's your dream for libraries? You know, there are, libraries run from the, these are just three quick pictures that I put that I pulled up, but, you know, from the very traditional and beautiful things like the U.S. Library of Congress. A couple weeks ago I was down at Yale for a conference and I went into the library there where they filmed that great scene from one of those Raiders of the Lost Ark episodes where the guy comes in on the motorcycle and everything. I mean, they're just so traditional and beautiful and I don't know about you, but for me, there's something very endearing and pleasant about that image and quite honestly, if I could have a job working in a very beautiful building like that all day, I wouldn't turn it down, because I love libraries like that and I love books and things, but that's not always the world that we live in and so there are really modern centers like the Hunt Library at NC State, which is fairly new and just this amazing information sort of center that's come up. And then the picture on the bottom right-hand corner is where I work at our latest building, the Research Center, which doesn't actually house a library, but those are the people that work in that Research Center are by and large a lot of the people that I work with and they don't need a physical library so much. So when you think about from the traditional to the very new modern information centers to places that just to research and don't have libraries, what is it when you're thinking about libraries and your dream for what they are or what they could be or what you wish they were or anything like that? And similarly, as you're thinking of that, what is your dream for librarians? And this is a wonderful picture of a librarian back whenever, I'm guessing 50s or 60s from, I believe it's either a Library of Congress or National Library of Medicine or whatever, but you know, doing what kind of jobs do you think that librarians do? What kind of job are you looking to do as you enter into this profession or if you're in the profession now and you might be thinking of transferring your skills to something else? What is it that you like to do? What is it that drew you to the profession in the first place? I personally would have loved to have been a news librarian and just kind of search through news stories and all that kind of stuff and help do research that way. Those jobs don't exist so much anymore so I do something else. But what's your dream for librarians and how we work within the setting that we're in? And then certainly the thing I want to touch on tonight is how do you plan to get there because you don't get to your dreams unless you have some sort of plan. Generally stuff doesn't fall in our laps. Every now and then, maybe, we're lucky and we get like a fortune cookie kind of, ooh, yay, that landed for us. But most of the time we have to have a blending of good fortune and hard work and they come together and the stars online or whatever and you build upon the networks that you've made or the skills that you've put together and you're able to build something out of that when you're paying attention. But you kind of need to have a plan and something in your back pocket to help you get from point A to point B to do that professionally. So these are things I want to talk about tonight as we go on. So I'm going to tell you a story. So for those of you who read my blog, you know that I draw notes. I draw sketch notes of meetings that I go to and things. One, because I like to doodle and two, because I started sketch note being several years ago when I read a few books about the whole idea of drawing pictures and tapping into both sides of your brain as opposed to one or the other and how visual communication really helps us retain memory better than, say, typing in your notebooks or on your laptops or whatever. So I really just kind of sitting down and playing on the salient point of the talk and writing them in a way that makes sense to you. There's a lot of research on that. And if you're interested in it, you can always either read my blog or send me an email and happy to share resources because it really does, it's been a lot to me over the last few years. So you can see this is from when I was still working in the library, September of 2014. And we were having one of our annual all staff retreats. And for those of you who are working in the library now, we're worked in any area where you have to go through that dreaded thing of strategic planning. Maybe you like it. Some people do like it. I don't. I just don't my thing. We were at that point in the library. And it was time to do another sheet plan. And so we were looking ahead and a library director who was incredibly innovative and we did a lot of really interesting things in our library. And I had a good run there in terms of work. The talk, though, the planning stage of it all just was really kind of weighing on me in terms of we never had enough money to do anything. We never had enough staff to do all that we wanted to do. We weren't going to ever get raises. We weren't going to get increases in benefits, all those kind of things that, you know, after a while they just kind of build up. And I've been there for ten years. And while I really liked my colleagues and I liked where I was, and we just bought a house in town so I wasn't moving anywhere, I was thinking, well, what else, you know, this isn't really what I want to do. This isn't the environment that I want to be stuck in for a while. And so I just started to think, what can I, what do I have? You know, what is the skill set that I have that can maybe translate into something else, be it another library locally or something else here at the medical school where I was working. And so that was really the challenge for me. It's not unhappy where I was working by this time. And if you've worked in, at least in my context of health sciences libraries for a while, you know, this is not uncommon. My library was not uncommon from any other academic health sciences library or hospital library or anything. Everybody was, everybody's facing these issues all the time. And I was just kind of a little bit tired of journals always going on, but not in the budget and blah, blah, blah. So what was I going to do with this? And so I started to think, well, what can I do? What can I do? And this is me a long, long time ago. When I was growing up, we were a camping family. We can't, this is, I think it's probably, you know, I think it's my backyard. But it didn't really look like the backyard that I grew up in, but it could be. Anyway, we were a big camping family. We camped for our summer vacations. We camped probably one weekend every month. My family went, my brother and I and my mom and dad. And we just, it's just what we did. And we enjoyed it. And we enjoyed getting on and doing things later on in life. I realized this because my parents are both public school teachers. And it's probably the only thing they can afford for us to do. But we, we, we had a lot of fun with it. And as I got older, my dad was really into backpacking. And he would alternate spring break weeks between my brother and I, I'm an older brother. And he would take us each for a week. And so when I was thinking about my own strategic plan and I thought about, I thought about backpacking with my dad. And to be honest, I came up with this, as you can see a couple of years ago. And the more interesting, it's not interesting. The more touching thing, my dad passed away just this past spring after a very long illness. And so it means a little bit more to me now even, even then that we had these experiences together. And so we would go on these backpacking trips. And my mom would drop us off at some trailhead and we, and on a, you know, a Sunday. And then she picked us up the following Saturday, so however many miles down the road. And these are the rules. I mean, I started doing this when I was maybe about in the fifth grade. But these are the rules that I have in terms of hiking with my dad that I thought were very applicable when I was thinking about my own career in libraries. And so here's my backpacking strategic planning model that I came up with it. And the rule number one is that you plan for as far ahead as you can see, but no further. So my dad and I were hiking together. Of course, I was, you know, fifth grade, however old that is, 11, 12 years old, and my dad was grown. And so he would walk as far ahead of me, get a longer leg to walk as far ahead of me until I couldn't see his backpack anymore. And then he would wait for me to catch up, which was great for him. He's got a lot of breaks, not so great for me because I just always think he's going, but that was okay. But he always had an orange backpack or red backpack or something that he could see. And so I thought, you know, that's a pretty good model for life. You just plan for as far as ahead as you can see. And in particular, when you're working in our field now where information is changing so incredibly fast and our job changes so incredibly fast, it's really difficult to set up any sort of strategic plan that's usually going to last more than a year or two. You know, because everything is just shifting beneath you. And so I thought it was a nice metaphor and a good lesson to learn about or to take with you in terms of, so you need to plan ahead enough that you can see, but not necessarily too far ahead because you have no idea really what's going to be around that path or around the bend in the turn. And the other thing is to keep your eyes on a reliable object. So for me and my metaphor, of course, was my dad's backpack and my dad himself. It's, you know, in terms of our profession, the reliable object for me has always been peers and a great collaborative network of people to work with, a skill set that I know that I can fall back on, a skill set that I continue to evolve and work with so that it expands as what I need to do. But all these things that are very reliable. And in all honesty, people, I think, particularly in librarianship, I think that people are, and your network of peers and professional mentors or whatever, are very much the most reliable thing that you can count on in looking ahead. The third thing, of course, is to look down at the ground every now and then so that you don't trip and fall. If you're on a trail, if you're on a vocational path, you know, you need to be kind of grounded. You need to know what's there, what the environment is really like, and not to be just kind of wandering around wherever so that you can easily trip and fall and get out of your way. And at the same time, number four, to look up every now and then so that you know actually where you're going. And you know, those string off the trail or down some sort of pathway. Within my own profession, I know a number, a few years back when Bioinformatics was just coming on board and there was a lot of talk within medical libraries that Bioinformatics might be a place where librarians, biomedical librarians could get a foothold and it didn't really turn out to be that way just because it was biology and we were all medical librarians and Informatics, which we seem to think, oh, information, that's us. It's a very complicated and detailed world and has grown into a huge field and there's not really a place for librarians there. So it's really kind of good to just yourself. So I think there's a, three and four probably came to me from, if you, also if you read my blog, you know, I kind of do music and play music and all sort of stuff. There's a very good song by the singer-star writer, Ani DeFranco, who talks about, if you look down, you trip over your feet or look up or something. I'm sure that that's where I came up with that, number three and four from that. But anyway, so based on that plan, you know, you can't, it's really difficult to have any sort of plan without goals and objectives. I learned that, anybody's learned that, make some business anywhere. And so my three goals and objectives that go along with my strategic plan is to know yourself, know your environment, and know how to bring these two things together. And if you can learn to do that, regardless of what you're working in, regardless of what you're doing, be, whether we're talking about your career or tech, pretty much anything in life. If you know yourself and you know where you are and you find a way to blend those two things together, you'll be in pretty great shape. And you can see down there in the corner, that's just, that's my dog, Eliza, the tricolored hound dog. It's puppy in the talent pool because you'll be pretty talented. You'll be a worthy talent that people will look for and you'll have a good opportunity for lots of jobs and other things that you can do. If you can practice these three goals and objectives, you'll be in the talent pool there with Eliza and whoever that friend of hers is. I'm not sure who that friend is, but some friends. And so basically what I'm trying to say from all this is that when you enter into this field, the biggest thing that you're trying to do nowadays is to look for whatever your patron, whoever your patrons are, whether they're researchers or doctors or nurses or the public or school kids or whatever field of librarianship you plan to go into, everybody has a specific set of needs. And you kind of need to know what those are and you need to keep abreast of them. You need to update them. You need to really stay on top of this kind of stuff. And then you also need to have a very good inventory of what your own skills are. And then, of course, the big challenge and the big goal of all of this is simply to fill in that gap of what you know how to do and what your patrons need. Right? It's sort of, I think, as Steve Jobs always said about Apple, it's kind of knowing what your customer needs before they even know that they need it kind of thing. And I don't begin to even say that I'm that skilled in this, but it is a matter of having an idea of what might help the people that you're trying to serve do their work the best and then putting that there. And it's a little bit of work to figure out what that is. And then you keep working at it and honing that skill. You'll be, you'll be, it's a great advantage for you in terms of moving ahead. So I want to talk a little bit about how you do, how I did this personally. And then hopefully it'll give you a good idea that you can do it yourself wherever you are either now in your library or if you're looking for your first job or your new job or shifting over or whatever. I want to talk a little bit about this. So of course, the first thing is to know yourself. And a little bit of background about me. I had a bunch of careers and they've involved, some of them have involved pretty extensive data about exercises and knowing myself. And so formally and informally, so it gave me a good starting point for all of this. And I, so I encourage you to do this. And so when I think about myself and I think about knowing myself in terms of work and I just make a big long list. And this is, this is a list right here of lots of jobs that I've had over my lifetime since up in the lifting courtyards. I was a babysitter and I probably started doing that when I, who knows, I was a pre-team maybe in my neighborhood to working in the drive store when I was in high school to scooping ice cream at the Grand Canyon one summer, to being a fitness instructor and exercise physiologist. And they kind of, you can see I have a few ministerial jobs there because I did that career for about 10 years. And a lot of other kind of things that came along. Right. And then, yes, I went into the field of librarianship, which is great. And today my title is a research evaluation analyst, which is just to me a very specialized librarian. And whatever people say, what do you do? I say, I'm a librarian. I don't get into trying to explain what a research evaluation analyst is because I'm not really sure. But I didn't know what a librarian is. And so I start from that place. But the point being that from every one of these jobs that I've ever had in my life, I can probably pick out a skill or two that I learned or that I gained from doing all of these jobs that I can apply to my work today. So you might say, what in the world does being a swim club manager have to do with being a librarian and research evaluation analyst? Well, when I was a swim club manager, I had to manage people. And I had to do schedules. And I had to plan ahead for things. And I had to make sure the snack machines were filled, which doesn't have anything to do with what I do today. But it's kind of about meeting people's needs. When I scooped ice cream or was a short order cook, I had to deal with the public all the time. When I was a minister, I did a lot of public speaking and preaching. And I did a lot of teaching and Sunday school classes and stuff. When I packed packages at LL Bean was in graduate school. I learned how to punch a clock and how to empathize with people who might not be professionals on my level or whatever. And all of these things are really great experiences. And out of all of them, I learned skills that when I try to do my job today, I guarantee you I pull. I rely upon them for lots of different things. And so I think what happens too often in our careers nowadays has become very specialized, which is important. It has its places and times and places. But we try to learn to be like a really great reference library. I want to be a really great reference library for whatever architecture, whatever library you're going to end up in. And you need to be really good at it. And you need to know a lot of basics about it. I'm a medical reference librarian. I need to know every database that's going to be important to me in finding health information for the people that come to me. I need to know how to find systematic reviews. I need to know how to do great search streams and PubMed and all those sorts of things. And that's really important. But I also need to know how to talk to people. I need to know how to teach people. I need to know how to stand up in front of other people and present information. And all of those things, it didn't necessarily learn in library school. And you can't really count on library school to teach you all of these things. And so you kind of have to dig deep into the other opportunities that you've had in life, or if you haven't had them, find ways to have them so that you can pull those skills into your skill set. And then the next task in terms of knowing yourselves to know is you've got this list. And you have all these things that you know how to do. And that's really great. And then what I did in terms of moving when I wanted to move from the library into something else. And I didn't really know what else. But there was an opportunity for me to work in the Translational Science Center. I looked at all the things I knew how to do. All of them. And not just the few things. Not the few things. The many things I learned in ten years in a working library. But those things, plus all those other things I learned from other jobs. And I looked at this opportunity. And I looked at the job requirements. And I looked at what they wanted in somebody to do this job. And I simply sat down and I matched every one of those skills that I had to the needs that this particular job was asking of me. And you can do that either on a big scale like that for a new job. Or when you're within your own job current position. Do it for that to develop new things or to figure out how you can best meet the changing needs of the people that you're working with. Because I can tell you in the ten years that I worked in the library. I probably had ten different jobs. Ten different job titles. Ten different people that I was working with. From consumers to scholarly communication issues. To the research community. To third year medical students and all that sort of stuff. I worked with lots of different people. They all had different needs. And so you kind of have to do this inventory. You have it constantly going. And when I say constantly, I mean it's an obsession that you do of course every day. But it's something that you just have. And have a little notebook. Have a mental note. Whatever works best for you. To kind of, these are all the things I know how to do. Even if it's like you take one, a couple hours, one morning when you have a down time at work and go, why don't you think about all the things I know how to do. And just make a list. And then you just go back and visit it every now and then. And add new things to it as you go along. And then think about where you are or maybe where you want to be or what you want to do. And it's like a giant match game. And you just kind of work from there. And so when I did this for, to move into the new. And not so new job now because I've been here almost a couple of years. But you know, I could say these are all the things I know how to do from my job. I know how to develop data dictionaries. I know how to write grant proposals. I know how to teach people. I know how to develop communities. I know how to measure research impact. I know how to mentor people. I have experience in leading people. I work well with others. I do play well with others on the playground. All that sort of thing. But I can really write this down, all of this down. And then when I had to work with the HR department to convince them that, because you know, when you think about it, people put a job description out there or an application out there and they say, this is, this is what we want. And information is so kind of a sword ubiquitous or whatever. It's just like, it just, it's so hard to get a handle on sometimes. But if you, if you can make the argument, if you can say, look, I do, I know how to do all of these things and they all relate to information. And you have all of these needs and they all relate to information. And despite the fact that I was a librarian and they were looking for an evaluator, I was able to make that argument pretty well in that, look, I, I know how to do all these things. And these are the needs that you have. You need to know how to track your researcher. You need to know how to track their publication. You need to know how to, to measure their, the impact of the research and the projects that you're funding, et cetera, et cetera. And you might not call me an evaluator, but I sure do know how to do that because of the skills that I have. And so that's how I was able to just kind of move into this job. And it was nice because it gave me something really new to do, something, just kind of a fresh start, a little jumpstart in interest in things. And I've been able to learn a lot of new skills that I didn't have before then. And now that my notebook list is even longer. So basically what I'm trying to say is that a librarian is, you know, one person. And we can define a librarian as like, here's, I'm a librarian. And it means blah, blah, blah, blah. If you were trying to explain to your family what you do for a living as a librarian, unless you are a librarian that works in a public library and checks out books to people, if you have not a clue what a librarian does, at least that's from my experience. But a librarian is one thing. A librarianship can mean, you know, a dozen, two dozen, a hundred different things because it all has to do with information. And information is just everywhere nowadays, be it in packaged form or packaged form. It's needed to be organized in some way. Data needed to be put in some sort of format, all this kind of stuff. And that, you know, here in high school, I went to an high school, I went to Syracuse. It was an information school, not a library school. We kind of moved beyond that. And, you know, librarianship is just a part within information science. And it lends itself to an awful lot of things that we can do. And so I threw this slide in there. This is a poster that I did a few years ago for a symposium. And it was just kind of explaining how. And this is when I was still working within the library itself. And I had been charged with reaching out to the research community, which is something that we really hadn't done. So I did this little subway map because, again, I like to draw pictures and doodles and all that kind of thing. And so I grew up in the Virginia area. If anybody's from the East Coast and, you know, Northern Virginia, Washington, and the Metro, it's kind of both the Metro system. But, you know, so you can see that the hub of everything was the library. It's the transfer station. But my job really reached out to all of these other areas, be it from the main building, actually physical locations in the main building to the research building, ACC building, which I do where I work now to shall relate, et cetera. All of these lines and all of these things and relationships that I developed. And you can see I have these little station features in terms of organization and knowledge management and communication and disseminating research findings and doing literature, searching and systematic reviews and billing collaborations and data management and all those sorts of things. And basically just a schematic of how the one bigger question mark center library center, which at one time everybody came to, now it was the librarian's role to get out to all of the other places. And once you get out, you develop this great networking system of ways of transferring your skills and your knowledge to lots of different places. And it can bring you lots and lots of different opportunities to do things. So this is a slide that actually put together for presentations that it just did a few weeks back in Michigan to the Michigan Health Sciences Library group. And I thought I would just share with you today because when I was looking at the job that I have now, you can see over on the right, this list of these are the qualifications that they won for an evaluated graduate degree experience in the environment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And so I went back over in terms of listing and measuring my own competencies and qualifications and how I can match those with what I knew how to do. So of course I knew how to interact well with stakeholders. Librarians know how to do that. We have stakeholders and we do that. I knew how to collaborate across groups. Team science is big in clinical presley-stall research. And I knew how to do that because about every team the library had ever put together and everything about how to work with people from different backgrounds and different skill sets and on sort of being leading teams and being collaborative and permanent planning and design and all that sort of stuff. So basically this is how I kind of pulled the competencies and qualifications from a particular, a very specific and particular job, the one I have now into how I, what I knew how to do and how I could apply for it. And then I ended up with this whole other name. And if you follow my job title, and so, you know, I, my blog that I write every week or not every week getting more used to it very good about every week. That's once a month, a couple times a month. But it's called a librarian by any other name because I am a librarian and you might, I might be called today. I'm called a research evaluation analyst. I've been called an informationist. I've been called a house colleague communications person. I've been called a consumer health librarian, reference librarian, you know, on and on and on. But the bottom line is that I'm a librarian and that's what I say to anybody that I'm talking to when I'm talking about things like this, that it doesn't necessarily matter what's my business card, that the bottom line is these are the things that I know, these are the skills that I have from being a librarian and they are applicable across the board to lots of different areas. So I put these slides together on Monday. And this is a wonderful quote from a book by honor Roosevelt, which I can't believe I left the book reference off of this slide. But I read it over the summer. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a weekly column. It's not a daily column. I know for sure it was weekly. It wasn't a daily column even. And the New York papers went, went after she was the first lady of the United States. And he just turns into the wonderful wisdom. And this is from one of her last books that she wrote before she passed away. And I think it's, to me, it's like the greatest quote I've ever come across that comes to everything that I think librarianship is all about. And it's just that life is interesting only as long as there's a process of growth or to put it another way. We only grow. We can grow only as long as we are interested. And being interested in other people and what they do and our patrons and what they need and what we like and what we want to do. To me, that's really the crux of our profession and what we want to accomplish and how we're very successful in what we do. And so that's what they put together at less than time because I hope you do have some questions or some ideas or. Okay, so Renee says, I'm in my semester working in an e-portfolio. How can I incorporate that into a resume? Yeah, in terms of incorporating your e-portfolio into your resume, per se, like literally incorporating what you have. Technically, I'm not sure how that works. But what I would say is I keep an online scholarship professional page going and I keep all kinds of things that I'm doing there. And I just kind of harvest those things, I think, over into any resume that I'm going to sit down anywhere or if people are going to ask me to speak somewhere or anything like that. That's kind of how I rely upon that. And I think I would do the same in terms of if I was in your position at finishing up school, I would kind of look at all the things that I've collected over time, over my studies in my portfolio, and really pull out those salient points and things that you can transfer over. That Jill says to follow up with her offline, because no doubt she has some great ideas for that. But that's, I think that that would be really a great thing to do to just kind of pull that together. I can say to someone, let's throw a different case, out of my library career. You know, the most difficult and challenging aspect of my permission, I would say my part is the stress of always, it's a balancing act between always dealing with a lot of change. The profession is so immensely different today than when I came into it even, I think, you know, 12 years ago, I can't, and when I hear people who have been at this for, you know, 20, 30, 40 years, and they share their experiences, it's amazing to me the difference, you know, all that they've seen happen. So to me, that's a huge challenge to be able to embrace it and be able to live within it. And some people are better at it than other people. And I've been able to do it, I think I'm okay with it, but I think it is certainly a challenge that's there. The difficulty in it is that as you're always changing, you're constantly having to prove or re-prove or reinvent or whatever, you're worth to people. And that's kind of hard, that can wear you down over time. I think depending upon where you are, you know, it's tough, I think, depending upon your environment, how much value people just intrinsically place upon libraries. And so people place a lot, and so people will not so much. And so you're always kind of trying to, you know, re-prove for like the better word that what you do is valuable and needed. And so I think that that's probably the hardest thing that I've come across in my profession. Let's see. A good blog post. Okay, that's a good one. Tell me about this. Clubs are the most helpful. What were my most helpful for your time at school? Let me think back to library school. You know, I stumbled into a couple of classes that just happened to fit my schedule. And they were about like building online libraries and things like that, which was kind of new at the time. And I was like, I'm never going to do this. But it turned out that that was my very first job was to build kind of an online resource for things. So it actually was a very helpful thing to do. So I guess the takeaway from that is to not necessarily pass such as a rigid plan that I'm going to take the, you know, always follow this path. Sometimes it might be kind of good to take some course that you got, I had no idea where this was going to lead me or where I'm going to learn from it. But you actually learn a lot. I learned a ton of stuff about metadata and, you know, building catalogs and online catalogs and things, which I had no interest in doing at the time. But they came back to be very beneficial to me in my work and actually continue to be because I do a lot of stuff in web design. I think the other thing, I took an information architecture class, which I was like, I'm never going to build websites. But quite honestly, you know, the whole design aspect of it is just great and you do learn how to put a lot of things together. So I think that was probably great. I think the most beneficial thing in terms of hands-on, I can quantify that this led me to a job was my internship. And I did an internship at Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine and at the hospital there, where I had done an internship years earlier as an exercise physiologist. And it was not my first choice, but I ended up there and it led me onto this whole career of other things. I came across a wonderful mentor who eventually connected me to all kinds of medical librarians in New England. And I have the job that I have today and I've had it for years. So I think that that's been, you know, networking is huge and the people that you can meet and make those contacts and push-offs are great. Let me see. Do you have tips for students when they're evaluating their press jobs? Oh, we get stuck at that point. Boy, you know, that's a great question. I think it's really, for me, it's just kind of a brainstorming activity more than anything. I sit down and I just think, gee, what did I ever do? You know, I had this one job in an office for years. You know, I was working part-time doing other things. And it was an accounts receivable clerk, you know, and I had to call people and tell them to pay their bills. They were like, what in the world would that ever happen? How could I translate that to today? And it made me organize. It gave me, I don't know, whatever the hutzpah or whatever the word is to pick up the phone and call people I didn't know to have conversations with strangers, things like that. And, you know, we don't necessarily think that those are translatable skills, but they're enormously translatable. Being able to talk to people that you don't know, being not afraid to pick up the phone and call somebody that you don't know. Certainly, if you end up in public libraries calling somebody and asking them for money, you might actually be a very good skill for you to have them online. But, you know, all those kind of things. And I do think it's, I think it's easy to get stuck on that because we think so much about these defined competencies. And, you know, we're very specific about this skill set that we think we should have and we forget about this other stuff. And yes, so yes, think broadly, exactly. And not, I think it's very much not trying to just say, I know how to do, I know how to answer a reference question. Yeah, but what is, what is all of that? It's all about interviewing. It's all about communication. It's all about taking notes. It's all about, you know, the back and forth and everything. It's all about questions from doing a reference question. And all of that, you then, you know, how do you then take that and do the next thing of how do you write a paper from doing a reference question? Or how do you do that? What do you do? I encourage all the generalists or specialists. That's a great debate. What do I encourage people to do? I've waffled back and forth in my career. I'll admit it. I think that when I first started working in medical libraries, I was convinced that having a graduate background in that health science was really a benefit to me. And it helped me specialize in those things. And I still think that to some degree. I certainly think that I took classes at a graduate level and things like statistics and research methods and stuff like that that was not associated with libraries that is paid off well for me and being an evaluator and their role outside of libraries. Because I'm not sure exactly how you're performing the structure so much, but unless you have to do original research and write a thesis and stuff, going through that process is really important to understand how researchers work. I didn't get that in my preschool, but I got into another program. And so that was really great. And it helped me a lot. That said, I have plenty of colleagues who just they're fantastic at doing systematic reviews regardless of what the subject is. And they're amazing search, you know, search people regardless of what they're looking for. They just know the basic skills of how you search things and how you phrase questions and all the syntax and all that sort of thing. And so that's a very general skill that they can apply across the board. So I think that's kind of a wishy-washy answer. I don't have a, I don't come down on the generalist or specialist thing. But I will say the one thing that you need to have more than anything is an interest in what you're doing. And because if you're interested in it, that's why I love that quote by Conor Roosevelt. If you're interested in it, you'll just be naturally inclined to learn about it. If you're interested in genetics, you'll learn about genetics. And that will make you a better librarian in that field. If you're interested about politics, you'll know politics. You'll learn about it. And you'll be better than that. So that kind of thing. Let me see here. I need to navigate cats and resumes. Oh. I read something recently, and I don't know if I particularly agree with it. I haven't thought about it enough to have a strong opinion. But it was a thing about if you're older and going to film, I don't know what he is in their career right now. But I came to the library and it was my third career. So I didn't have gaps in terms of work, but I had these on-ball things that didn't necessarily fit together to say I wanted to be a medical librarian. But someone mentioned something about job and volunteer work. I put that stuff there. So maybe you don't put dates so much. I'm not sure. Quite honestly, I haven't had to put a formal resume together in a while. So I don't know the best practices for dates and things. But someone was telling me to not put dates on anything. Don't put dates on your degrees. Don't put dates on when you did things because of issues about stages and whatever. I don't know. I'm not sure that I have a great-I don't have a solid opinion on that yet. I'm not sure that I agree one way or the other on it. Because on the one hand, a lot of experience is a good thing. On the other hand, yes, it can be held against you. Somebody goes, oh my gosh, you graduated from college 30 years ago. What have you been doing? And I'm kind of new to the field that sort of thing. So I think that-I think the resume sounds good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, joking up with that. It feels good. But that's what I would say with that, filling in those gaps. But again, I think what I really do think is where-and I know resumes are great for getting in the door. But I would also say that in your interview is where you can really expand upon your-what you can bring to a job. And that's where you should really focus. Any other questions? I could be rocking on the couch. I'm actually still in my office. Thank you, Kate. That's not my office tonight, but I did take a little break. So I went on to have some people taking, taking. Tech is a great thing. Anything related, you know, tech is-how can you market your skills? Like, look at what's out there. Look at what you want to do. Think of, like, what's your dream job? Once upon a time I did an interview for a job. Yeah, it was kind of informal, so I could do this. But it was great. It was a great exercise, I think. I think that I did a top 10 countdowns of the 10 people I would want to be a personal librarian for. And I thought it was great because it made me stretch all these sorts of things. So maybe if you think about that in terms of what's your-what would your ideal job be? Kind of like the very beginning when I say, what's your dream of a library? What's your dream of being a librarian? So if you want to be an instructional-being an instructional librarian, that's your dream job right now. Like, what-where would you want it to be? And kind of looking at all that research places, the best place that you can imagine doing, and just kind of fit your-fit your skills to it and kind of look at, what do I know? And what-what can I improve upon? What could I do better? You know, I think I'd sort of sit down for myself. So my ideal job-when I did that top 10, my ideal job was to-would be to be a personal librarian for Terry Gross, if you know Terry-Terry-Good, if you follow National Public Radio, and she does the Empire Show Fresh Air, and interviews like all those amazing people. To me, that would be like the awesomest job ever, and just be her personal librarian. And if I think about that, I would think, what would I need to know to do that? You know, every kind of news database, you know how to talk to people, you know how to connect people, you need to know how to reach out and all that sort of thing, and just kind of build on that. And, you know, truth be told, I'm never going to be Terry Gross's personal librarian, but I do a good job where I am now. And as will you, wherever you are. Let's see, give me three of these sources. You know, research institutions, you can just sleep and get paid. Nobody pays you to sleep. Sorry, Felicia, there's none of that. Sure. And I guess you could be the sleep study. Sleep study, you can pay for that. And the university, yeah, yeah, yeah. The university would actually give you a great bit of opportunity to do all kinds of things. Okay, that's the one. That's the best job. There you go. Anything else? My aspiration, there you go. That might be about it. Okay. So that's great. Thank you, everyone. My contact info is there. Folks have already left. You can get my contact info anyway on the slide. You can post them. Really, I wholeheartedly say if you have any questions or just want to reach out and touch base, please do feel free anytime. I'm happy to do that. Okay. Thanks, Jill. Thanks, Felicia. Thanks.