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The more I read scholarly papers, especially those written by professors of humanities, the more I realize that people such as myself, that is, people coming from another linguistic and cultural background, will never be able to catch up, no matter what, with well-educated native English writers. It is an insurmountable handicap, no matter how hard some psychologists would try to find some sort of feel-good theoretical frame.
It looks like it paid off to spend a whole term on sweating a cultural essay about the Romanian alphabet; but the news only reopened a window through which I could see some hard work ahead: rephrasing ideas, smithing words, giving birth to more elaborate sentences (what other metaphor can one think of when writing is such a painstaking effort?) and rechecking bibliographic references (mostly, citations). I’ll see.
What I found scary was when a word, or group of words, was used to comprise the notion of “one year;” whoever will have read this message, and is in the business of librarianship, will understand quite well what I mean.
In the middle of so many events, some more imaginary and others barely real, I ran into a peculiar message sent through an ALAlistserv that I had subscribed to. It came from an MLIS graduate who has not found a job for six years—since he has graduated from a US library school. What seems to come out from this person’s sad story is a theme of passivity, of almost abandonment, framed by a strange occurrence of unfavorable circumstances.
Some of the subscribing members were rather unsympathetic, instead of offering some solutions. Others narrated some similar stories. It appears that possessing an MLIS degree is just a small step, really small, on the tortuous path of starting out as a librarian. Unless someone has solid connections (this is not equivalent to networking, though—well, OK, just a subset of it), which is the case only for a minority of students, MLIS graduates have to hone their networking skills and, as an example, to participate, even as volunteers, in different activities that are conducive to an interesting career in librarianship.
Tomorrow is another hectic day in To, but I hope the effort of searching for a place will pay off. I shall see. Actually, this info gathering is quite exciting.
