Hello, prospective GT!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/minafresh-amanda/53443429/

I’ve noticed that quite a few people find this blog by searching “manchester library graduate trainee” or variations of that, and I wanted to say that if that’s you – hello! I hope you find this blog interesting and helpful, and if you have any questions at all please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer. Enjoy 🙂

Give me all your money (for a good cause) (updated because I’m an idiot)

I don’t usually do this, but it’s a special occasion. In March I’m walking 14 miles from Chelsea to Sutton to raise money for the Royal Marsden hospitals, who do very important work in cancer care. They looked after a friend of mine for a long time and were absolutely brilliant, so I want to raise as much money as possible for them. If you’ve got any spare change and would like to give some to this cause, the JustGiving page for my team is here. (For anyone who tried to click this earlier, the link is now fixed) Thanks very much!

Blog post for Manchester NLPN

Manchester NLPN’s logo, shamelessly nicked from their Twitter page

I’ve contributed some thoughts on interviews for graduate traineeships to a blog post that’s all about being a graduate trainee, which you can read here on the Manchester New Library Professionals Network blog. You should read all their other stuff, too, by the way, it’s really good. And if you’re on Twitter, so are they! That’s here.

A Tale of Two Interviews

After writing about my five top tips for interviews and interview prep for the Manchester NLPN, which will be on their blog very soon, I thought I’d write about my own interview experiences for Library Graduate Trainee positions. I found the application process initially pretty disheartening – the first few applications I sent off didn’t even get a reply, which isn’t great when you’ve set your heart on a career in librarianship. But after taking on board some good advice and tweaking my CV and applications, I managed to get two interviews within a week of each other, one for MMU, and the other for a library based in Oxford. Here’s how they went.

Interview One: I arrived at MMU with about an hour to kill, which was annoying – obviously being early is far better than being late, but when it’s so early that I’ve got time to get more nervous, it doesn’t feel great. I hung around in a café until it was a more acceptable time, and then headed in. There were two interview panels running at the same time, so I was sat outside the interview rooms with a couple of other applicants, and we all did that thing where you try not to stare at the competition too much. When eventually it was time to go in, I chatted a little bit about my journey and the weather with the woman who had come to collect me, who turned out to be one of the three interviewers. She instantly put me at ease and I was only feeling a little bit shaky when I sat down.

After the introductions, we got straight in to the interview. The first few questions were pretty standard – what do you do now, why do you want to work here, that sort of thing. They asked for more detail about some of the things on my application form, which I was prepared for. But then the questions veered off into unknown territory: “what is the best and worst thing about your university library?” I hadn’t anticipated this question at all, but luckily had recently spoken to one of the librarians at my uni and was able to talk about what I thought about the improvements that were planned there. They also asked me to explain how I would help someone who came to me with a query about searching on the library catalogue.

After these questions, it was my turn to ask some. I asked about who is responsible for the library’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, and a couple of other questions that I can’t for the life of me remember!

The whole interview probably took about 20 minutes or half an hour, but it felt really quick. I had felt quite relaxed and was aware that I had been speaking animatedly but not too quickly or nervously (or at least I hoped that was how it came across!). I was happy that it had felt more like a chat, and that I hadn’t run out of things to say. All in all, considering this was my first ever job interview (!), I thought it went rather well.

This led to quite high hopes about Interview Two, and maybe a tiny bit of complacency too. I was feeling like the Interview Queen after MMU, and so when the Oxford one did not quite go as well as expected, I was caught off guard.

Sweet Sorrow by Caro Wallis on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/carowallis1/4463478302/

 

Interview Two: On arriving at the library I was given a tour by the current GT, which I felt was a really nice touch, as I had the opportunity to hear about the job first-hand as well as seeing the library. I then went in for the interview. The room they’d chosen for this was quite a large, oak-panelled room, with the three interviewers sitting round a longish table in the middle and me at the end of the table, at a distance from them. This produced an entirely different atmosphere to the MMU interview, which was held in a small, cosy office, with us all sat around a small desk. Instead, I was in quite an imposing room, and felt more on edge.

The interview proceeded as normal, with the usual questions about why I wanted to work there and so on, but as I was not feeling as comfortable as before, I felt that I was having to force my enthusiasm a little bit, and was not getting much of a reaction from the interviewers, which was quite disconcerting. Then I was completely blindsided by a question that I should have been prepared for. They asked whether I had had any previous committee experience – something which would be important for this post, as part of it was to act as a secretary for the library committee. I went completely blank and ended up saying something not very convincing about how I was on the school council during secondary school (which is true, although we didn’t really have to do very much). I was taken completely by surprise by this question, even though I really shouldn’t have been, and I think it put me off my stride. I felt sort of defeated during the remainder of the interview and I just don’t think my heart was in it any more. I think at this stage in the interview I knew it was unlikely they’d offer me the job, but I also think I didn’t really mind too much. I don’t think I would have fitted in as well with the staff at that library and it wasn’t really my kind of place – it was a lovely building, but a larger team in a modern university library is more my thing,I think.

The story, of course, has a happy ending, because as you know I am now one of the Graduate Trainees at MMU. After leaving the second interview and walking through Oxford in the pouring rain, I got back to the house where I was staying and no sooner had I walked through the door than my phone rang – and it was one of my interviewers from MMU, calling to offer me the job. I was so relieved I cried! She said to me that I had been really personable and enthusiastic during the interview, which I was really pleased to hear. I accepted the job offer right then, and a week later I got the letter I had been expecting from Oxford letting me know I didn’t get the job there.

I find it quite interesting that I could tell straight away whether I’d done well at each of the interviews, and my colleagues have all got similar stories of interviews where they just knew either that they definitely had the job, or they’d definitely hate the job. Some places just don’t suit some people. I’m really glad that I was able to come across well in my MMU interview, and my first impressions of the people and the place turned out to be correct – I love working here!

Jen’s job hunting tips

Another library blogger, Jen Gallagher, posted some great tips on searching for library jobs along with a list of resources that could be useful – I know I’m going to use this blogpost when I’m looking for work later this year. Read it here.

What’s been happening?

It’s been a little while since I last wrote anything, and that’s partly because I forgot, and partly because not much has happened. Recently I’ve been doing a lot more of the same stuff at work – withdrawals list, podcasts, rinse, repeat. I got some feedback on my last set of podcasts which was basically “too small, too blurry, too quiet”, so I’ll need to redo them this week. I finally finished the large chunk of the withdrawals list that I was given, but it’s not the end – I’ve got roughly another 150 pages to go, but I’m taking a break from that at the moment as we have a new toy to play with at the library. It’s called a Digital Library Assistant and looks like an alien ray gun. It reads RFID tags inside books on the shelf and generates a list of exactly what we’ve got, which is really useful for when the stock gets moved to its new home in 2014. However, we’re having some teething problems with it, in that it seems to not have recognised everything on the shelf, so I’m going round the stock finding books that it missed so we can work out what happened there. It’s almost identical to my withdrawals task, but it feels different, so I’m enjoying the “change”.

Other things I did this week and last:

– Fill in a book order card for the first time in months, completely mess it up and have to start again. Argh!

– Receipt and process 3 parcels-full of new books, which weighed a ton. One of the books was tiny – about 5cm by 10cm, spiral-bound, 30 pages long. Very cute, but very fiddly when it comes to getting a stamping sheet inside.

– Create new shelf-end signs for the book rooms, to make it a bit easier to navigate the shelves. They look great, but I had some trouble getting the old ones off – I had to take a ruler and scissors to a few of them to lever them off as they’d been stuck down with miles of sticky stuff, and in the small book room I had to use a screwdriver as they were screwed on. This caused a bit of a panic when I thought that I had accidentally dismantled a shelving system, but turns out the shelves are just wobbly anyway. Phew.

– laminate a LOT of things. As well as the shelf-end signs, I made new “New Books” signs and one explaining how to locate books. That all adds up to a lot of plastic pockets to fight with.

– digitise a book chapter for someone, get to page 26/30 and very nearly press the “cancel” button on the scanner. Almost had a heart attack.

– not much else! It’s slow at the moment, but we’ve got new students in, so there’s a lot of teaching and a lot of people needing help at the enquiry desk. Every so often we get floods of students coming to the counter after their induction session, all wanting their PINs for their library accounts. We’re heading towards dissertation season, so things will pick up soon.

– on Friday and Monday I took annual leave, and went off to a tiny village in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales for some much-needed fresh air. Here is a picture of said air (and some scenery):

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Just brilliant. We watched the Super Bowl on Sunday night, and I was really glad to have Monday off to recover! Tuesday was hard going at work, but as I have Wednesday mornings off, I am feeling very refreshed and relaxed now.

It’s been mentioned that I might do a blog post for some friends of mine about my job and future plans, which will be nothing new to regular readers of this blog, but I’ll post a link to that for you if it happens.

That’s about it for now – hopefully something interesting will happen soon, and then these posts will be a bit more interesting!