Who am I? A graduate student? An aspiring researcher? An academic? A Twitter bug?

In this story, Twitter bug Witty Academic Librarian (@WittyAcademic_) talks about how she is a librarian by profession, active Twitter personality by choice, and a researcher at heart.

Librarianship was not always my intended career path. My original goal was to pursue a PhD in Social Psychology, but when I wasn’t accepted to a school with funding, I had to re-evaluate my career goals.

Research
I fell in love with the research process when I was an undergraduate student, and that was when I knew who I wanted to be: a research assistant (or something equivalent). My mentors across my undergraduate career, Dr. M. and Dr. K., both facilitated my love for the scientific method, assisting with participants and all things quantitative (especially meta-analyses).

Librarianship
Librarianship, quite honestly, is something I stumbled into. I graduated with my first master’s degree in psychology one week; this was kind of bittersweet because I lost both of my jobs at the time due to my non-student status. I didn’t think I would ever get to be engaged with research again.

The very next week I started a part-time job with my Alma mater’s library. A year after beginning that job, I was enrolled in a Library Science program. I had some awesome academic librarians persuade me to pursue the profession, and I was selected for another part-time academic library job because of my enrollment in a library science graduate program. This career would allow me to 1) have a career in higher ed and 2) learn something new every day.

I love being a librarian!

I didn’t go into librarianship because of my love of books, but I went into it because of my love of information. I love that I get to learn something new every day, and because of the nature of Special Collections researchers, our library users are often telling us about what they’re learning. I don’t have the time to do every research paper, but getting to learn new and interesting facts is part of what makes my workday interesting.

One of my coworkers is in agreement with me about her love of information. However, I made this declaration in my Reference (or reference equivalent) Library Science class… and several classmates were appalled. The instructor of this course said “It takes guts to admit this in a venue full of aspiring librarians.” I definitely think this instructor was correct. It’s not that I don’t want others to read (I absolutely do), but it isn’t how I would like to spend my free time (unless it’s a REALLY good book). I’m just going to point out though — academic librarians don’t have a lot of time to read on the job (unless it’s research articles).

And then…Twitter!
My Twitter account originally began when I was a graduate student the first time. If anyone keeps track of handles, I was @SnarkyMinion. This began as a way to cope with the stress of graduate school without being vulnerable to real people I knew. Although over the years, I have told a few people about this account, it has largely remained anonymous. Some of my tweets were about cultivating a persona, or what I thought life was like as an aspiring academic. I took my cues from people like @ProfSnarky, @ReadTheSyllabus, and @ProfessorJaded. Some of my tweets today are still about crafting this persona, but now that I have more obligations, I have less time for Twitter than I used to — so it’s mostly real updates and experiences.

While I’ve probably looked at all these sides of academia, I definitely identify with aspiring researchers the most. I will always be a researcher at heart.