Greetings from Montreal
by Jing Liu ~ November 6th, 2006. Filed under: Uncategorized.Please excuse me for not being in contact with most of you – I was homeless, sort of. Believe it or not, I moved 4 times in less than a month. Thanks to Jing for letting others know that I was still alive and well. I eventually moved to a permanent apartment last week that I call it home now. I do not yet have Internet access at home. I am temporarily using someone’s wireless connection. Anyway, I have been thinking about posting. Trust me, I am missing all of you!
Life in Montreal is quite different from Vancouver, not to mention the challenges from the work, especially in the begining. I am glad that things are starting making sense to me now. As a member of the systems team, my job is to maintain the Integrated Library System and work on other information technology services related tasks. The job seems to be what I was looking for. I am happy and excited about what I am doing. I believe I will never get bored with my job. There are always new things coming up to force one to learn. Fortunately, I am working with a group of talented and friendly people, who are there for questions and help. From school to real professional world, what I can say to those who are getting their degrees is that how little I know about the profession and how little I can offer. Besides that, I find communication skills extremely important from my short experience (I guess Linda would like to hear that).
I hope you all are doing well. Please feel free to write. On another note, my UBC interchange account has expired recently. Please use my gmail or hotmail account for future contact. I will send you my new address and phone number by email shortly.
Take care and keep in touch,
Heather
November 6th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
Thank you for sharing your fresh experience in Montreal, Heather! After reading your post, I felt kind of relieved to know that my panic was not that unreasonable when thinking about the real librarian job I am going to take in a couple of months (I wish :). Coming closer to the end of the LIS study, I had a feeling that I was not as well-prepared as I expected to be when I started. Though a little worried, I guess that’s the beauty of this profession — having the chance to learn new things all through your career.
November 7th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
You will soon join the Toastmasters? There must be clubs on campus in McGill.
November 9th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
One way to survive the new challenges is to learn from each other. We now have a big enough pool of knowledge brough by librarians who work for the government, academia, public, children, young adults, science, business, education, and other special kinds of libraries. Oh, systems, digitization, metadata and management. Now we all know about Heather’s busy and happy life, I am wondering about Henry. Will check and share his info later.