Tag: job hunting

Mentoring MLIS Students on the Job Market: How to make mentorship work for you and your mentees

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Lexi Kadis, Teaching and Learning Librarian at the University of Maryland Libraries.

I was in a state of perpetual déjà vu throughout the Spring 2026 semester. Just a year ago, I was on the academic librarian job market—revising CVs, writing cover letters, interviewing (rinse and repeat)—and now, I was helping six Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) graduate students navigate the job search process.

I work as the Teaching and Learning Librarian at University of Maryland Libraries where I am also a co-director of the Libraries’ Reference and Teaching Fellowship (RTF), a three-semester, scaffolded professional development program that prepares MLIS students to be academic librarians. Since its founding in 2015, the Fellowship has supported more than 50 Fellows and has a proven track record of helping students find jobs (I should know, as I am a 2025 RTF alumna myself!).

Over the past semester, I have learned that supporting MLIS students on the job market takes a great deal of time, energy, and emotional labor. While I am a part of a team of four librarians who mentor our Fellows, I understand that for many librarians, providing mentorship and guidance to graduate students is a siloed act of service to the profession. To that end, I wanted to share my experiences and perspectiveon how to provide effective and sustainable mentorship to MLIS students.

Don’t Be the Cure-All

I first want to acknowledge that many graduate students turn to their library supervisors and mentors for job search guidance because of a lack of support from MLIS programs. Many of our Fellows have noted that the coursework and infrastructure of their graduate program has not prepared them to apply for academic librarian positions. From knowing when to start applying to jobs to turning resumes into CVs to preparing for full day interviews with job presentations, the hidden curriculum of the academic library job process is not being taught in library science classes.

Given the deficit of structural support—something you may have experienced in your own MLIS program—it is easy to want to be a cure-all for your mentees. However, trying to provide all the solutions is not a sustainable model for mentorship, particularly when it comes to the job search process. Based on my own experience, it is important to clearly communicate to your graduate students the types of help you can provide and when they should seek support elsewhere. Even if their MLIS program does not have a robust job search support system, students may have access to a campus career center, for example, and you can direct them to these types of resources.

Synchronous Feedback is your Best Friend

Guiding MLIS students through the job search process is very time-consuming. Reviewing materials, practicing for interviews, and serving as references can quickly eat up your whole work week. That is why it is helpful to think of ways to reduce time spent on this aspect of mentorship. One of the best ways to save time is to provide synchronous feedback only for application materials (whether CVs, cover letters, job presentation slide decks, lesson plans, etc.). For our Fellowship, this typically looks like a 20-30 minute meeting where I meet with the Fellow to review their documents and to provide verbal feedback.

I have found that synchronous feedback has benefits for both mentors and graduate students. It takes significantly less time to read and comment on a cover letter in person or over Zoom as, compared to doing it asynchronously. Additionally, when providing live feedback, students get to ask you clarifying questions in real time. Our Fellows have also noted that synchronous feedback is more helpful because a mentor reading your cover letter mirrors a potential employer doing the same. Rather than receiving line by line edits, hearing someone’s gut reaction helps graduate students understand if a cover letter is written effectively and persuasively.

The Emotional and Invisible Labor of Mentorship

I want to conclude this post by recognizing the emotional labor that goes into mentoring MLIS graduate students. We all know that the job search process can be emotionally charged, especially in an increasingly competitive job market and an unstable world at large. Writing cover letters and preparing for interviews is a deeply personal and vulnerable process that can bring up questions of identity and various feelings. As mentors, we are not only helping students to navigate the job search, but also the emotional potholes that come along with it.

It is equally important to acknowledge that mentorship is often invisible labor. The guidance that library mentors provide to graduate students is invaluable but often overlooked or unseen as part of our professional portfolios. The lack of visibility contributes to the isolation of mentors from each other. Based on my work with a team of librarians to support our Fellows, I believe that mentorship is at its best when it is collaborative. We can become better mentors by learning from each other. I encourage everyone to share their ideas, advice, and resources for mentoring MLIS students within their networks and communities.

Lastly, I want to thank the librarians and LIS professionals who have mentored me over the course of my library science journey and education. I think mentorship is very much a pay-it-forward act of service, and I am very grateful to be able to be a mentor to current and future graduate students.

Scared, but In a Good Way: Navigating My First Few Weeks as an Academic Librarian

Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Katie Kuipers, Assistant Professor and Affordability & Digital Initiatives Librarian at St. Cloud State University, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2023-2024 year here at ACRLog.

I spent the weeks following graduation in May as I imagine many graduates do: desperately applying for jobs.  With a Master of Library and Information Science degree in hand, I was eager to dive head-first into the world of professional librarianship.  As each rejection letter came, however, my excitement dwindled.  I decided to pivot my job search and focus on jobs that intrigued me rather than applying to any and every librarian job I found.  Although I had no experience working in an academic library, I took a course in grad school about the issues in the academic libraries and conducted research on first generation students and the information literacy skills of first-year students.  This led me to applying, interviewing, and accepting the job as the Affordability & Digital Initiatives Librarian at St. Cloud State University.

I packed my bags and excitedly moved from my home in North Dakota to St. Cloud, Minnesota.  A few weeks before the semester began, I received an email from the Dean asking if I would be interested in co-teaching a course for the fall and teaching it on my own for the spring.  Wanting to challenge myself, I replied that I could.  At St. Cloud State University, academic librarians are also faculty members.  Not only was I the Affordability & Digital Initiatives Librarian, but I was an Assistant Professor for the University Library as well.  I had no idea what this would mean until I showed up for the new faculty orientation on campus. 

New faculty orientation overwhelmed me.  Suddenly, I was inundated with acronyms I was unfamiliar with like “P&T” (promotion and tenure) and “PDP” (professional development plan).  While other new faculty were finalizing their syllabi and drafting their assignments for the semester, I was feeling massively underprepared and began developing imposter syndrome.  I returned to campus the next day unsure of what lay ahead of me.  After receiving my workload from the Dean, I had a clearer picture of what was expected of me; however, I was scared that I was in over my head.  Along with teaching, I was tasked with creating affordability workshops, designing an online affordability course, and supporting faculty adopting, adapting, and creating OER, all of which was new to me.

Once I met my colleagues, I realized I had a wonderful support network right in front of me.  Over the past couple weeks, they have caught me up to speed on the status of the Affordability Initiative at the university, explained numerous acronyms, shared their professional development plans from previous years, and checked in with me to see if I have any questions as I navigate my role.  My co-professor generously offered to take the reins for the beginning half of the semester to allow me to observe her teaching style.  We have been collaborating on discussion questions and class activities to ease me into the course.  Along the way, I have been making notes to prepare myself for my own course next semester.  The department chair has been instrumental in my adjustment to the position.  She shares her teaching experiences and is patient with me as I learn how to tackle library instruction and research appointments, another aspect of my workload.  Overall, the department has reassured me that everything will be okay.  I will encounter bumps throughout the year, but that is to be expected of a librarian fresh out of grad school.

Even though I am only a few weeks into my position, I can see a lifelong career in academic librarianship.  I enjoy getting to know my students and want to help them succeed.  I am adapting to the workload and drafting ideas to implement throughout the year.  Thanks to my colleagues, the imposter syndrome is starting to subdue, and I am feeling more confident in my position.  Am I still scared?  Absolutely… but in a good way. 

Academic Library Job Search Roundup

The fall semester is in full swing at most U.S. colleges and universities. While many folks finish up their graduate library degree in the spring, others finish at the end of the summer or after fall. And as I was scrolling through Twitter last week I was reminded that the academic library job search can happen anytime during the year, and is not necessarily tied to the semester schedule:

Seeing this tweet — and the super useful library interview questions database that Gina links to — made me think about all of the job searching posts we’ve written here at ACRLog over the years. Here are a few I’d like to highlight that might be of use to recent LIS graduates looking for positions in academic libraries:

– Should’ve, Would’ve, Could’ve: The Library Job Hunt: Last year recent ACRLog alumna Quetzalli Barrientos wrote about her experiences both as a job searcher and as a member of search committees.

– First Generation College Students and the Job Search with an MLIS: During our second Hack Library School/ACRLog cross-blogging collaboration last year, HLS blogger Chloe Waryan wrote about looking for academic library jobs from a first generation college graduate perspective.

– Academic Interviews from Both Sides: This post, co-written by Brenna Murphy and me during our first Hack Library School/ACRLog cross-blogging collaboration, explores job interviews from the perspective of an interviewee (Brenna) and an interviewer (me). While I’d add a few things to this if I could rewrite it — for example, we now send our interview questions to all candidates before the interview — I think it still holds up fairly well.

For interviewees, I’d also recommend browsing Hack Library School’s entire archive of job searching posts. And for interviewers, Angela Pashia’s fantastic piece Seeking a Diverse Candidate Pool should be required reading (h/t to Angela for the suggestion to send interview questions in advance).

What other resources have you found helpful in an academic library job search? Let us know in the comments!

How to Become an Academic Librarian

Becoming an academic librarian is like entering an amnesic whirlwind. I can hardly recall what came prior because my work life is now a frenetic series of emails, meetings, conference proposals, meetings, reference desk hours, and meetings. Sometimes I indulge in a short break to quietly cry under my desk (kidding). Slowly the academic life, with its attendant paperwork and politics, is becoming normal for me.

Being on the “other side” of job applications is still strange, though, and I want to reflect on how I received this privilege. I would like to say that my hard work and persistence got me here, but a lot of it was luck. However, prospective academic librarians have to lay the groundwork to even get lucky. So what follows is my two cents on laying the groundwork for luck.1

To preface: I follow the “I’ve gotta eat and pay my bills” model of career planning. My priority has been to keep a roof over my head and food on the table, so I pursued any opportunity that helped me meet these goals. I have two master’s degrees but I worked full-time while earning each of them. And if I may be sassy for a moment, I highly recommend setting yourself up for academic career success by being born into a family of academics or upper-middle class professionals (which I was not). These sorts of families tend to put their kids through school/offer financial support as well as invaluable education and career advice. However, with a little extra work and a whole lot of networking, blue-collar upstarts like me might still find a path into academia.2

Step 1: Work in a Library

Work in a library before you get your library degree. Or while you get your library degree.3 Discover if library work is right for you before committing to a degree program or getting into debt for it. Working as a page or a circulation clerk gives you an inside view to how libraries work and offers opportunities to befriend librarians and other employees that have or are considering pursuing library degrees. Getting paid library experience on your resume will also be a huge boost in your job hunt, because many academic library staff/librarian job postings require a specific amount of experience and the hiring committee will carefully calculate each month of experience that you have to see if you meet the minimum (volunteer and intern experience is worth half as much as paid, in my experience). For one of my staff jobs my library experience barely made the cut, even though I had a library degree and the job required a bachelor’s.

Step 2: Make a Plan for Your Career

If you can’t find a job in a library, and you still get a library degree, don’t go into extreme debt for it.4 Come up with a solid, and realistic, game plan for what you’re going to do after you graduate. I did not have a career plan when I graduated with my bachelor’s in English and I really regret it, because I had no idea what to do with myself. (And also I graduated right before the recession began. See also: How to accidentally end up working for several years in a national park). To help make a plan, scope out other librarians’ CVs and LinkedIn pages (my tweep, Dan, @512dot72, reminded me of this trick). Thanks to the internet, you can discover how many librarians got to where they are. Find someone that has the kind of job you’re interested in, and google them. Poof: instant inspiration!

Step 3: Network and Intern

My best piece of advice for those aspiring to be academic librarians is: network and intern. The seeds of my career were planted in the connections I made. My first library internship gave me a taste of working in an academic library. In library school, another student I met through peer mentoring helped me get a second, unofficial, internship at UC Riverside. A librarian at UC Riverside helped me get another unofficial internship at Arizona State. My internship supervisor at Arizona State introduced me to everyone at the library, and when a staff position opened in another department, I had already met the supervising librarian and was somewhat familiar with the collection involved. I got the job! Good internal references are a beautiful thing. In that job, I was able to take on a lot of librarian-type duties (and get a practically free second masters as a university employee) that helped me get my current job. I also got invaluable training and advice from wonderful mentors. I am so grateful for the help they’ve given me.

I recognize that being able to intern, to spend hundreds of hours working for free, is extreme privilege. Again, this is why I credit luck with getting to where I am. I spent years working in hospitality in a national park, where the low cost of living in employee housing enabled me to pay-as-I-went for library school and also to save enough money to support my later internships.

Step 4: Customize Each Cover Letter and CV to the Job Posting

In my second internship, an experienced librarian clued me into the academic librarian hiring process. An academic librarian search committee thoughtfully prepares a job posting and carefully compares each application received to the requirements and qualifications outlined in the posting. Many committees use a spreadsheet to assign applicants scores on how well each bullet point is met. Scores are compiled and applicants are ranked.

For every job application that I prepared, I copy and pasted the job posting into a word document and broke it down into a table. Next to each required/desired qualification in the posting, I made a note about how I addressed it in my cover letter or CV. This means that I wrote a custom cover letter and tweaked my CV for each and every job posting. This took a lot of time, but also ensured that my application would be seriously considered and not thrown out just because I didn’t include all relevant experience and skills. Librarians on search committees will never assume, or extrapolate, that you meet each listed qualification. You have to clearly show that you do in your materials.

Step 5: Remember that You’re More than Just a Librarian

Treat your job hunt as a learning opportunity and you won’t be disappointed.5 I prepped and traveled for multiple out-of-state interviews over several years before I finally received an offer. I now have really good interview skills. I met a lot of interesting people. I write good cover letters. I’m grateful now that I didn’t get offers from some of the places I interviewed because I wouldn’t have been happy at those places in the long run. My favorite blogger, Alison Green at Ask A Manager, frequently offers the advice to forget about your applications once you send them in. Any time spent wondering about those jobs is time that could be spent applying for new jobs. This holds especially true in academic job hunts, because the time from application to offer (or rejection letter, more like) is usually measured in months, and you could drive yourself crazy thinking about what you’ve applied for. Once I got a rejection letter for a university I didn’t remember applying to because I had applied ten months prior. You also may not receive rejections at all, or receive emails addressed “To Whom It May Concern.”6

Finally, have a life outside of libraries and outside of your library job hunt. Avoid (excessive) moping and complaining, especially in public online spaces where you are easily identified. Negative thoughts beget negative thoughts. Keep up with your friends, and spend time with your family, and indulge in hobbies that make you happy. I took up running because it’s relaxing and helps me feel like I have control of my life! After three and a half years of librarian job-hunting, I finally got an offer and I was delighted to accept it. My job makes use of all of my degrees (amazing!) and I’m close to family and friends and I love our students.

Best of luck in your search! And if you have additional advice or useful resources, please comment below!

 

1 Full disclaimer: I have served on a search committee to hire library staff, but not to hire librarians, so this is really truly just my two cents. No refunds!

2 Highly recommended reading for blue-collar academics: This Fine Place So Far From Home.

3 I did neither of these things, though I did intern, and it took me forever to find a library job, let alone a librarian job. My saving grace was avoiding student debt.

4 I realize it’s too late for many librarians, and hindsight is 20/20, and also the economy was/is horrible.

5 You’ll still be disappointed. But positive spin can make you feel better!

6 Which happened to me and did not feel good since I spent two hours on that application and they couldn’t even be bothered to use mail merge to address their rejection emails. But I digress.