My four jobs
Jul. 26th, 2014 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12So things have been pretty full-on since I graduated. I had two jobs while I was doing my PhD - one was working as a library invigilator in my own faculty library (which I'd been doing since 2010), and the other was working as a library assistant in another faculty library (which I'd been doing since January, 2014). However, in the past two weeks, I've picked up another two jobs. One is an invigilator job in yet another faculty library. The hours are a bit erratic - I'm currently doing a project for them which involves sorting through old volumes of the Cambridge University Calendar (a sort of diary of events for each academic year) and noting down any damage or interesting annotations before the library gets rid of them. After that's done, I'll be doing normal invigilation work for them, with more regular hours.
My fourth job is a temporary thing, and involves helping an academic sort and catalogue his book collection and then clear out his office. He owns over 1500 books (I counted), as well as numerous bound and loose journals and periodicals, which makes this a fairly full on task. However, I quite like sorting things out, making order out of chaos and putting things into categories, so I'm finding the whole thing quite enjoyable.
These latter two jobs I got through my bosses at my faculty library, and the library assistant job I got initially through my former boss. I say this because I've been thinking about mentors and the importance of making professional connections. I've been lucky in that a lot of people have acted as informal mentors to me over the years. They've all tended to be, if not well-connected, at least very knowledgeable about the workings of the various Cambridge libraries - who's about to leave their post, who might need some temp work, which job is about to be advertised. My experience of this kind of system has not been limited to libraries - my work in journalism, childcare and retail was all, for the most part, enabled by similar environments. I've been really lucky and privileged to have these kinds of mentor relationships throughout my working life, to be honest. I might write some more about that in a later post.
But for now, suffice it to say that I'm swamped with work, and it came along at exactly the right time. I'm going to have to start looking for something with more regular hours after the work clearing the academic's office out has finished, but at the moment, things are good.
My fourth job is a temporary thing, and involves helping an academic sort and catalogue his book collection and then clear out his office. He owns over 1500 books (I counted), as well as numerous bound and loose journals and periodicals, which makes this a fairly full on task. However, I quite like sorting things out, making order out of chaos and putting things into categories, so I'm finding the whole thing quite enjoyable.
These latter two jobs I got through my bosses at my faculty library, and the library assistant job I got initially through my former boss. I say this because I've been thinking about mentors and the importance of making professional connections. I've been lucky in that a lot of people have acted as informal mentors to me over the years. They've all tended to be, if not well-connected, at least very knowledgeable about the workings of the various Cambridge libraries - who's about to leave their post, who might need some temp work, which job is about to be advertised. My experience of this kind of system has not been limited to libraries - my work in journalism, childcare and retail was all, for the most part, enabled by similar environments. I've been really lucky and privileged to have these kinds of mentor relationships throughout my working life, to be honest. I might write some more about that in a later post.
But for now, suffice it to say that I'm swamped with work, and it came along at exactly the right time. I'm going to have to start looking for something with more regular hours after the work clearing the academic's office out has finished, but at the moment, things are good.
