Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Lisa Shin, Research Librarian (STEM and Health Sciences) at the University of Ottawa, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2025-26 year here at ACRLog.
It’s hard to believe that a full month has already gone by as I reflect on the last 30 days or so, on getting my dream job as an academic librarian. As grateful as I am for the opportunity, I also wanted to take this time to break down some of the unexpected aspects that came with moving on as a graduate student into my first professional job in hopes to help future academic librarians and library students out.
Becoming Okay with Silence
Something that was striking to me in the last couple of months of transitioning from a student to a full-time professional, was the unexpected hurdles of communication. From months of emailing back and forth for interviews, receiving rejections, and other recruitment related communication, I soon started to receive little to no emails as I stopped applying for positions after my acceptance call. Recognizing that there are many bureaucratic processes that can often be slow, and especially since a lot of the hiring occurs in the summer when many are on vacation, it took a couple conversations with other librarians to help me find other ways to not be fixated on why I hadn’t received a physical contract yet. This can be super nerve-wrecking especially if you, like me, were already working in another job, but transparent communication with your managers and colleagues really helped me out. Letting your managers know each step of the interview process and being open about how things were going allowed me to not only gain advice but allowed my managers to get a sense of how things were going.
Moving to a New City
As I was very open to moving to a new city in hopes of becoming an academic librarian in my interested subject area of health sciences and STEM, I had always been ready to move and pack by becoming a minimalist. Something that I had not expected, was the unnecessary burden and stress that came along with looking for potential places (virtually), coordinating moving (virtually), and doing that with the uncertainties of a verbal offer. What helped me to be more comfortable with the whole process was having librarians who reached out to me who either had worked or are working to the university I was starting at. Not only did this give me a sense of preparedness, but it also allowed me to become more familiar with this new city, one that I’d never lived in before. Some prompts that I would suggest asking would be neighbourhood recommendations, must-haves in that city, moving process, quality of life, and overall atmosphere of the town.
Working in a Bilingual Setting
One aspect of the position I’m currently in as a research librarian at the University of Ottawa, is the great sense of bilingualism and respect for the Francophone culture and community. Although I am Korean by birth, and English was my second language, throughout my primary education and even thanks to things like the Explore program, funded by the Canadian government, I was always interested in developing my French further. The additional language aspect was something that I was pretty nervous about when starting this role, however, the “Frenglish” meetings, impromptu conversations with other librarians and staff, supportive French language centres, on-campus French courses, and really enjoying challenging myself with the material has been an unexpected highlight of my job. As an existing French New Wave and Annie Ernaux fan, looking into Francophone authors and researchers in Canada and abroad to learn from has been a very fulfilling time, and one that I am excited to continue. My goal eventually is to successfully teach an information literacy session in French, but please check in with me in a year from now- I hope I am at least a little bit closer to becoming trilingual ?
Establishing a Support Network
Moving from Toronto to Ottawa, and into an industry that is historically prominently white women, I was a bit nervous about moving to a new city where I had two friends in total (and both being from high school). My fears were quickly and thankfully extinguished though, as I discovered ways to branch out and become familiar with the various social committees and mentorship opportunities that were available. Being open to starting new conversations, proactively reaching out for coffee chats, going out of my way to look for BIPOC library organizations, and applying for mentee opportunities were some of the opportunities I took. LinkedIn actually also helped me to discover some connections in the city that I didn’t even know I had! The mentorship aspect was really important for me as these were senior librarians who started in a system that was more conservative than now, and who saw the various changes the profession went through. In a new city, new job, first job, and first big move, I think having this older guiding figure in my life really allowed to me to be more grounded and confident in recognizing my own strengths and what I could bring to the team.
There are many, many more things that I want to reflect back on, but perhaps I will save that for the next post where I hope to draw more meaningful ties to existing literature in librarianship.
Congratulations on the position! Just a year ago I was also reflecting on achieving my dream job as an academic librarian. It’s still as great as I imagined it to be, and I hope it’s the same with you. 🙂
Thank you so much Franky, congratulations on your first year, too!! the first 2 months have been a blast so far 🙂 thank you for reading my first post!!