Creating this blog to help me sort through some personal/professional/existential(?) crises I'm going through. Hopefully this will be a chance for me to vent and also practice writing.
I am currently in my last month at a Health Sciences Library in Tucson, AZ. I am a graduate student in my final semester of the SIRLS (School of Information Resources and Library Sciences) MLS program. Right now I work here only once per week for about 5 hours, I am able to keep this job (I've been here about 2 years now) because I'm still enrolled as a student. For my "real job" I work at a restaurant on the weekends. Currently I'm at the front desk of the library and a public member has been talking with my coworker for a good 15-20 minutes - longer than the time it took me to create this blog - about his wife's job and his own possible job prospects with a company that "definitely isn't Blackwater and isn't copying them". My coworker is better at dealing with this than I am. I think he has a rapport built up with this guy. Me? If he started talking to me in this much detail I would probably just stare blankly and think "Why are you telling me this". Although, I guess, that sort of depends on my mood. My coworker always seems to be in the mood to have long rambling discussions about what ultimately leads up to a font of crazy. Aaand there it goes - guy asserts that he knows "a lot more" about something than coworker, proceeds to make irrational claims about the wrongness of some story in the news, any rebuttal is wrong. My defense is to smile and nod. Coworker continues to discuss - he's a trooper.
Anyway. I'll be losing this job in a few weeks after I graduate as I will no longer be a student. Currently, even though I will have my MLS, I feel like I have less than zero job prospects in my field. NO ONE at this University wants to hire someone newly-graduated from my Joke of a program. They want people with 5-10 years of experience and they can find them because this field is hemorrhaging jobs. I applied to a job at an archive facility where I had previously interned and even though I was applying for THE SAME JOB I DID LESS THAN 6 MONTHS EARLIER I was still rejected. HR didn't even pass my information on to the hiring facility even though they acknowledged that I was "qualified". A contact at the facility said they had more than 200 applicants to the job - I was dead in the water. I didn't even have a chance.
I suppose it's kind of sad but right now, professionally and personally, that's how I feel - dead in the water. I have no idea what I am going to do this summer other than keep applying to the 1-2 jobs that come up every other month and taking more and more shifts at the restaurant. I look at my fiancee, who has interviews or is getting recruited by Real Companies at least once or twice per week, who is turning down jobs left and right, and I think "Damn. What do I even add to this relationship?". What do I add to anything, really? I look at these jobs that come up and I get discouraged from even applying, knowing it will be 3-4 weeks of anxious hoping and then nothing but heartbreak and disappointment.
I feel like I have nowhere to go. I'm dead in the water.
