A Mini-Conference About You: How to Academic-Librarian-Interview

This past summer, I spent much of my time writing cover letters and organizing my schedule for interviews. Starting from late Spring, I applied for positions globally, and had 7 first-round interviews and 2 second-round interviews, with some positions only having one round. Although a slightly stressful time, looking back on the past summer, I ended up kind-of having fun with all the travelling and talking about myself. For anyone in or about to enter the interviewing and application cycle, my thoughts are with you, and I hope that this post gives you a bit of a breathing room.

Cover Letter

Honestly, I think this is probably my least favourite part of the application process. Due to the sheer number of positions out there, it is very difficult to mold each one to my liking, so that each letter sounds slightly different from each other, while still containing who I am as a person and a librarian. My best tip for cover letters is to have the first paragraph as an introduction about myself, the second paragraph with examples for the specific position, and the last paragraph as research interests or fun projects that makes me unique or interesting as a candidate. I try to keep each letter to a page and a maximum 1.5 pages for positions that I am really excited about. For the last paragraph especially, I tried hard to align myself with the job posting while thinking of ways that I could innovate or make the position more to my strengths and experience (although limited). This way, I also had more fun writing the cover letter itself and saw more ways to integrate myself into the role, which also helps in the future if I was asked for a virtual or in-person interview.

Presentation

As someone who used to have a fear of presenting, in-person presentations are definitely more intimidating, however, I found that being physically in the presence of others who are wanting to get to know you and wanting you to do well really helps in terms of finding the flow of the presentation and catch the vibes of the room. Being in a new setting can take a bit of adjustment but preparing lots of back-up plans in case technology issues arise and preparing beforehand with a colleague also helps in brushing off any nerves. For the presentation style, I ended up ditching my favourite Canva templates and just used a plain PowerPoint with white backgrounds. This way, I could mold each slide deck with the institution’s unique services, projects, and presentation topic, while still adding my own voice and flow. I found that with a bare bones presentation, I didn’t have to worry about the colour scheme, and could add in any screenshots and images to my liking. In addition, accessibility features were much easier to use on PowerPoint which allowed me to easily navigate the screen reader and alt-text additions.

Q&A Period

In contrast to the cover letter, this was my favourite part!! Q&A periods can get repetitive over multiple rounds especially by the end when the interview panel seems to ask if I have any questions 10+ times (haha), but this is such a great way to be less formal and ask about literally anything! My go-to questions if I ran out of library-related ones were about favourite grocery stores and marathons. Something I underestimated was the Q&A period directly after the presentation. In the presence of any staff at the university library system, one can easily catch the atmosphere of the organization depending on the interest and engagement of the audience and the type of question asked. Interviews are definitely not one-sided, and this part of the process is definitely a chance for the candidate to gauge fit between themselves and the institution. My favourite interviews were the ones where library staff asked me questions based on my CV, which signaled to me that they actually read through some of the fun things I had worked on and thought about how I could bring those experiences to the position that I was interested in potentially working in.

Overall, I look back at this summer as a positive one. I got to travel, check out cool cities, and meet some amazing librarians at cool organizations and institutions! I wish that I could have three or four bodies to work on all those interesting projects and innovative institutions. Just being able to ask about the possibilities and the future they saw in me gave me a lot of hope for my future career in the profession. Although the stress of interviews and the job market can’t be diminished with a magic wand, I hope that it is possible to find a little bit of sparkle and joy while going through the process.

Towards a “pedagogy of the depressed”

“Okay guys, genuine question. How long until we’re justified in killing people over this?”¹

Alarmed, I tried to reroute our whole-class discussion. I asked students to refocus on the prompt I’d provided: Choose one of the AI-related issues we’ve discussed this semester and brainstorm a potential policy solution. Consider timelines, barriers, stakeholders, and other decision-making factors.

When one student reluctantly suggested that local, grassroots action would be the most effective way to make change, I excitedly shared a case study in which local resistance led to a city dropping their Flock contract. But the mood in the classroom continued to spiral.

“I don’t know about the assassination thing,” someone offered.

“Okay, but they’re already killing us,” a student said. “They’re literally killing us.”

“We need to do what they’re doing in France,” another declared. “They’re not going to school. They’re not going to work. They’re massing in the streets and burning buildings. That’s the only way they’ll listen to us.”

During class, a student made this observation: “It feels like all the older generations are panicking about AI, but our generation is just like ‘oh yeah, another apocalyptic catastrophe, okay.’” Their classmates nodded.

This is a generalization, of course, but I believe it’s grounded in a real phenomenon, at least here in the United States. In other countries that have been shaped by different catastrophes, generational divides may look different. Here, I’ve often noticed a difference in political and social affect between those who remember the world before 9/11 and those who don’t, and again, another between those who were adults before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the release of ChatGPT and those who weren’t. Many of my students were only middle-schoolers in March 2020. They were children in 2016. For my older colleagues, the world is spinning off its axis, but for my students, the world has no axis. There is no stable world to return to, one where we trust authorities and well-resourced institutions. Their world is rotten to the core, and it always has been.

I’m twenty-five, just a few years older than most of my students. I don’t remember a world before 9/11, though I’m told it was different. I don’t remember a world without the Internet, but I do remember one—barely—where iPhones and social media were wondrous and new. I haven’t allowed myself to feel big, world-changing hope in a long time, and I don’t remember a time when I hoped for something and it happened, or when I trusted an authority figure and they followed through. I can’t imagine what my students must feel like.

After my recent classroom experience, I felt more unsure than ever about my teaching. How can we teach students who feel so cynical and hopeless when we also feel cynical and hopeless? I want to feel something again; I worry about developing apathy, and, most importantly, about my students developing apathy. If a student finishes my course feeling less empowered than they did when they started, I believe I’ve failed as a teacher. I want students to leave my classroom equipped to follow their curiosity, engage in productive civic dialogue, and make change in their communities. But this semester, I’ve consistently heard from students that there’s no point in trying to do any of those things. That nobody will listen and nothing will change, no matter what they do–unless they do something very, very drastic.

To help me think through these issues, I returned to Pedagogy of the Depressed by Christopher Schaberg. Titled in a cheeky reference to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Schaberg’s book reflects on the rapidly-evolving, often depressing state of the college classroom in the early 21st century. “At a certain point, it seemed like all my students were depressed,” he writes. I nodded furiously as I turned the pages. “Or, rather, it wasn’t a certain point at all: it happened ‘gradually and then suddenly,’ to borrow a line from Hemingway. This was depressing. It changed the feel of the classroom, it altered the possibilities of how we could learn together.” (pg. 2)

Critically, Schaberg gestures towards this particular “depression” as a phenomenon caused by structural forces both inside and outside the academy, rather than an issue of individual students’ and teachers’ mental health. Even if we all had access to amazing therapists and infinite workplace wellness initiatives, the “depression” in question would persist. “The ‘depression’ I am interested in tracking in this book is not so much an individual experience, not located (at least not solely) in the depressed subject,” he writes. “It’s a state of things. It’s a depressed atmosphere, a dispersed feeling of dread that has as much to do with cultural forces and planetary circumstances as it has to do with the intense feeling of solitary helplessness.” (pg. 4)

And what a state of things! In the same vein, one of my colleagues recently shared this article with me: “Is It Burnout? Or Demoralization?” by Doris A. Santoro. While this article is targeted towards K-12 teachers and administrators, I believe it applies just as well to higher education. Santoro says, “Teachers who experience demoralization believe that the school practices or policy mandates that they are expected to follow are harmful to students or degrading to the profession and that their attempts to alter them have been fruitless. Demoralization is a moral type of dissatisfaction that needs to be understood as a problem of professional ethics.” While this is certainly a problem in higher ed, which Schaberg explores in Pedagogy of the Depressed, I think our students also experience “demoralization” in everyday life. So do we. “Demoralization” captures the dissatisfaction from feeling like it’s impossible to live in accordance with one’s values, that one is forced to live unethically, and there’s nothing one can do about it.

Defined either way, in a broad or narrow sense, “demoralization” is a cause of the malaise Schaberg describes. “Maybe what’s so depressing about all this is that it feels very much like living at the end of something,” he writes. “[. . .] I’m tired of keeping up the charade that we’re working toward real transformation, when it feels more and more like we’re mostly just maintaining a cobbled together machine that’s on the brink of falling to pieces.” (pp. 115-116)

The bulk of Pedagogy of the Depressed reflects on Schaberg’s personal experiences teaching college English. Schaberg contextualizes the need for a “pedagogy of the depressed,” and he raises useful questions around what it might look like. But he stops short of theorizing a clear, distinct “pedagogy of the depressed.”

I’ve been strongly resonating with this term of late, and I’ve also been trying to remind myself that all teaching (and all doing, of anything worth doing) must involve some failure, especially when I’m doing something as tricky as facilitating discussions on current events. Plus, failure invites curiosity and facilitates learning. I want to close by offering some thoughts on what a “pedagogy of the depressed” means to me and inviting you to share what it might mean to you as well. What does it require—from us, of us—to teach these students in this climate, when we often feel the same weight of cynicism as they do? How can we empower our graduates to be lifelong learners who change their world for the better?

A “pedagogy of the depressed” embraces the whole people who enter our classroom, with all their complexities, life experiences, interests, and frustrations.
A “pedagogy of the depressed” means not just accepting, but embracing, the fact that the classroom is an inherently political space. As Freire explains, there can be no democracy without an educated population; education is one of the fundamental pillars of a functioning polis. A classroom that claims to be apolitical is not, in fact, apolitical; it is interested in maintaining the status quo, which is a political choice.
- What follows from this? A political classroom is a classroom that empowers students to act. This requires them to understand what’s happening around them, why it’s happening, and how they might change it. I don’t think that third element was present enough in my instruction this semester. I could have provided more case studies of successful change-making, like communities resisting data center construction or Flock contracts, and then used those case studies as springboards for conversations about the issues at hand (economic investment in AI, surveillance technology, etc). I still want students to develop their own opinions and solutions; they might want to change the world in ways that I disagree with, and that’s okay. But at the heart of the discussion is a case study that shows them how change is possible, and hope isn’t pointless. As Freire himself writes in Pedagogy of Freedom, “One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicative, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias, capable of being angry because of a capacity to love.” (pg. 45)
A “pedagogy of the depressed” is based in the politics of refusal. Some might view “refusal” as a give-in or dead-end, but as Carole McGranahan (2016) has suggested, refusal may be a far more generative practice than acquiescence. Practicing refusal allows us to imagine an array of wild, beautiful futures that we may not otherwise consider. “Refusal is insistence on the possible over the probable,” writes McGranahan. “[. . .] Hope combines with will to refuse authorized anticipations, thus moving away from the probable into the possible.” (pg. 323) In this way, refusal may be a route to addressing demoralization.
In order to enable work based in the politics of refusal (refusing AI, for example, or refusing classroom surveillance), unionization is critical. And as my own faculty union says, “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.” This is true of the working conditions of all library workers, regardless of faculty status.
As one of my students shared: “I think it’s still important to stand up for our values, even if we know we’re going to lose.” This is the most important part of a “pedagogy of the depressed.” If nothing else, we must remind ourselves that we are still human, still kicking. Still here.

Works Cited

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
McGranahan, Carole. “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction.” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2016): 319–25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48579449.
Santoro, Doris A. “Is It Burnout? Or Demoralization?” Educational Leadership Magazine, June 1, 2018. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/is-it-burnout-or-demoralization.
Schaberg, Christopher. Pedagogy of the Depressed. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

For reasons of privacy, student quotes are approximate and representative, not exact, throughout this post. ↩︎

Three Pieces of Advice for First-Year Academic Librarians

I thought my first year at Vanderbilt had flown by, but as it turns out, the first semester of my second year seems like it’s moving even more quickly! As I finish up the first five weeks of the semester, I’ve been thinking a lot about how different this year feels from last year, and how I wish I could go back and tell myself not to be stressed because before long, I would have plenty of outreach from students and faculty! If there were three things I could tell myself a year ago, they would be:

Spend time on relationships

One thing that I didn’t expect about librarianship is how important it would be to build relationships with the department that I support – and that although the relationship building may take time to pay off, it’s important not to give up on it. For example, I started holding in-person office hours in the Spring 2026 semester, setting up a two-hour mobile office once a week in my department’s building. In that entire semester, only one person came to office hours. Most faculty and students who walked by didn’t give me a second glance, not knowing who I was. I wondered if I should even continue with office hours this fall, but the department assistant was excited about setting them up, so I decided to give it another try.

This semester, my department has moved back into their permanent building (which was being renovated last year), and there’s a central seating area where I can hold office hours. Understanding that faculty might not know who I was, I also made signage saying, “Library Office Hours Happening Now!” with my name and other information, and I put up the signage during the two hours, so students and faculty who pass by would understand who I am and why I’m sitting there.

Now, when students and faculty walk by, they smile and often introduce themselves or say hello. I have twice as many classes scheduled this semester as I did last fall, because as faculty have gotten to know me and put a face to a name, they’ve started responding to my outreach. I spent so much time last year lamenting how no one knew who I was, but it turns out that I just needed to be persistent and give it a little time.

Don’t panic if you don’t know the answer

When I started this job, I jumped into a lot of aspects of librarianship that I didn’t know a lot about. For example, the collection development course that I took in grad school didn’t prepare me at all for the realities of managing an actual budget, so I learned that on the job with help from colleagues (and am still learning!). I also try to say “yes, and” instead of “no” whenever I can – and even sometimes when I maybe shouldn’t. Late last fall, a faculty member reached out to ask if I could help her set up Perusall for a class. I confidently said yes, then spent the remainder of the day teaching myself how to use Perusall so that I could teach it to her later that week (for anyone else who’s never heard of it, it’s a tool that integrates with a course management system like Brightspace or Canvas so students can annotate readings). And so forth.

Sometimes I’m surprised when faculty members act like I know everything and have all the answers. Is it just an aspect of librarians being seen as knowledgeable people, or do they actually think I can do it all? I got a piece of the answer to these questions in a conversation with a faculty member a few weeks ago. She asked if I could come and teach her class, stating that since I had taught the class before and I had been in my role for several years, she hoped it wouldn’t be a problem to teach on short notice (neither of those were accurate).

I agreed to teach the class and didn’t let on that I had never taught it before and that I had only been in my position for a year, but I learned a lot from that conversation. No matter how uncertain or new I feel, people likely won’t even notice unless I draw attention to it. My faculty and students aren’t counting how many months I’ve been in this job, they just know that they know me and I’m here to help. In situations where I don’t know the answer, I’m learning to take a deep breath, not panic, and that I’ll likely be able to figure things out.

Enjoy the moment

Through my first year as an academic librarian, and even in the first few months of my second year, there have been both highs and lows. I would also remind myself to enjoy all the moments – the good moments, because they’re great, the bad moments, because they’re learning experiences, and everything in between, because the time will go by so quickly. Volunteer, get involved on campus, and enjoy being where I am and doing the work that I do every day. I hope this helps academic librarians who are starting their first years this semester. You’ve got this!

Making the Cross-Border Jump as an Academic Librarian

Moving to the United States, especially at this sociopolitical moment was not something I was expecting (re: see Violet’s most recent post here), however, a dream position came up that I couldn’t turn down! I wanted to take this first post as a regular contributor to ACRLog and mark this turn in my career in hopes to help anyone else who might be going through similar changes.

Applying

Interviewing and applying to positions in other countries is straightforward, like other types of interviewing, but reading the fine print may be necessary. Some positions say visa sponsorship is not available but may be open to Canadian applicants through the TN visa process. Sending an inquiry to HR before applying just to ensure that the institution and search committee is aware that you are a Canadian applicant might be a good idea as well. The academic library interviews were more intense than the Canadian interviews I have had, where the process was sometimes one and a half or two full days. The long interviews were personally appreciated as I tend to warm up over time and enjoy getting to visit the different campuses, cities, and have more time to get to know everyone at the library.

Moving

Moving away from home is definitely not easy but is unfortunately something that one needs to be open to in order to secure a job in academic librarianship. To make things easier for myself, I have adopted a sort of minimalist lifestyle (emphasis on sort of) and living away from home since high school has helped me become better at packing and moving (although it is cumbersome and physically draining). Many institutions already offer this, but during the in-person interview, taking advantage of all the opportunities to look around the city and neighbourhoods such as tours and lunches to ask questions, really opened my eyes in envisioning myself fitting into the city. The job is important, but a fit between the city’s lifestyle, food scene, cinemas, and bike/running trails were equally important for me.

Mental hurdle

I definitely think that the biggest obstacle to accepting a position in another country was in my head. Just the thought of working in another country was pretty daunting, but here are some strategies that helped me make the transition easier. First, identifying anyone at my current institution who has ever worked in the US, or moved from US to Canada, or other countries was really helpful. Getting to know their experiences and personal anecdotes really helped me prep myself and to know which questions to ask to which person. Second, asking if there were other Canadian librarians at the institution I was interviewing at was critical. This showed me that they had an HR team, an international office, and a department who knew how to support Canadian applicants as well as a network of librarians who had gone through the same or similar process that I could rely on in the future and during the transition period.

Logistical Things

This was/is still my least favourite part. From learning about the TN visa process, getting a new phone number, applying for a social security number, making a bank account, finding a place, thinking about taxes, and much more that I am probably forgetting, there are many steps that need to take place when you are moving countries! Surprisingly, there are a lot of other people who had also gone through a similar move (especially for tech, engineering, post-graduate degrees, etc.) that I could reach out to in my own life and read about online. Something that I had trouble doing was asking for help when I needed it, especially things like rides and their time, but I am actively working on it and trying to put myself in their shoes and thinking about how happy I would be if someone reached out asking to share my time and experiences.

The main message that I wanted this post to show is the transparency of the process and encourage others who may be on the fence about it, especially early-career librarians! There really are no boundaries, and these paper processes can be annoying, but there are entire teams at the library from human resources to managers who can really make the whole move less stressful and burdening. I also wanted to take this post to thank everyone who helped me during this transition and to those who shared their experiences, knowledge, and time with me!

First Year Reflections

Tuesday of last week, August 4, marked one year in my role at Vanderbilt. The time has flown by! One of my goals for the summer was to reflect on my first year as a librarian and to plan for the second year based on what I’d learned. Although I haven’t had as much time for that reflection as I’d hoped, for my final post as a First-Year Academic Librarian blogger, I wanted to share a few lessons learned that I’m planning to build on during the upcoming year:

Be proactive

I started this job last year only three weeks before the first day of fall classes. Although it felt like enough of a head start at the time, especially considering that I had only moved to Nashville a few weeks prior, I wish that it had been possible for me to start earlier. As it was, there were several classes that I had to get ready to teach or co-teach at the last minute, relationships with the department I support that I was trying to build in a hurry, and a lot of basic information about how everything worked that I had to learn. Even with support from the other librarians at my library, plus our library director, it all felt like a whirlwind.

One example of something that I wish I could have planned better for was when I met individually with around 25 students from the same degree program, almost all in October, for research appointments. I realized about halfway through the appointments that the students all needed help with the same skills – choosing databases and learning how to search with Boolean terms – and that it would be a lot more efficient for everyone’s time if I could have taught all the students that in one instruction session. This year, I reached out to the appropriate professor in late July and asked if I could come to a class early in the semester to teach everyone the basics of a library search. Happily, she enthusiastically agreed. My hope is that this year, I’ll be able to spend my appointments with students talking about their specific search topics and make the sessions more tailored to their research interests. But that wouldn’t have even been a possibility if I hadn’t learned from last year and proactively reached out this year.

Build community

During this first year, one of the main things I knew was how much I didn’t know. I had tons of questions (and still do), and more things to learn seemed to come up every week. Luckily, librarians are generally helpful people, and I’ve gotten very lucky with how many people around me have been willing to help me out. My colleagues at my library, Peabody, have been incredible, always willing to answer questions and take the time to walk me through different processes and procedures. Additionally, there were actually six new librarians (including me) who started at Vanderbilt last summer, and we all bonded pretty quickly. Being able to check in with them, ask each other questions, and serve as sounding boards has been a huge help. We also started a journal club that’s expanded to include other newer librarians, and having that built-in community is great.

I’ve also been able to make and strengthen connections with librarians outside of Vanderbilt. One of my professors from library school is now friend and mentor – in addition to our frequent Zooms, we’re also co-authoring a textbook chapter. The education librarian from UNC-Chapel Hill, where I did my MSLS, has also become a friend and colleague. We support a lot of similar degree programs, so we chat around once a month about what trends we’re seeing with our students, what helpful resources we’ve found, what new ideas we’ve tried, and more. And, because I get so many business-related questions, I’ve also looked for business mentors who can help with questions. In addition to all the business librarians at Vanderbilt, who have been great, I’ve also connected with UNC-Chapel Hill’s business school librarian. Building all of these relationships and communities has taken time, but it’s been time so well spent. My first year would have been so much harder without my colleagues and friends, and now I have these solid connections to move forward with this year.

Learn lots!

When I first started, my library director told me that “this is a learning year.” I agreed, because of course that made sense on the surface, but at the time I didn’t fully understand what she was getting at. It took going through this first year for me to really understand what she meant. There’s so much more that I know now after a full academic cycle. Some of it is tangible – like being proactive – but a lot of it is also intangible. I know which months will likely be busy and which will be slow(er). I know how much fun it is when the students come back to campus after the quiet summer. I know that I need to work ahead on projects because every day is different, and saving something for a specific day probably means that that day will get overtaken by something else and I’ll have to scramble. I know that a big part of my job is just being present, both at my library and at my department, and getting involved with whatever’s happening. And even with everything that I’ve learned in the last year, I’m very conscious that there’s still so much I don’t know. There’s always something else to learn.

Looking ahead

Students will be back at Vanderbilt in about two weeks. I’ve already done some prep work for the upcoming semester and academic year, but I have a lot more to do before classes start. I’m looking forward to being back in the classroom and meeting with students more regularly, as well as reconnecting with colleagues who I haven’t seen as much over the summer. Vanderbilt Libraries also hosts regular professional development sessions for newer librarians during the school year, so I’m excited to see familiar faces at those sessions as well (plus, more learning!). I’m also just really interested to see how I feel about this second year compared to the first year. My hope is that I can learn just as much, while also building on what worked from last year. I’m looking forward to it!