Professional Development Statement
My Background & Path to UCLA
During my undergraduate at the University of Iowa, I double majored in film studies and geography along with getting a minor in informatics. I had initially been interested in pursuing film archiving as my topic of interest and potential career path but I was unqualified for many of the jobs that I was interested in due to my highest academic achievement being a bachelor’s degree and an overall lack of experience within that industry. This is what led me to look at graduate schools that offered such training. UCLA eventually was what I chose as my school due to its proximity to the film industry as well as its connection to the rest of the information science school, unlike other options that were solely focused on moving image archiving. After the first few quarters were over I realized that my interests began to shift more towards librarianship than archiving. I felt that working in a library would allow me to pursue multiple disciplines whereas an archive would force a choice in a single area of interest. With that mentality, I switched my goals completely and began to focus on librarianship during my second year.
My Coursework
My course work reflects this initial trajectory and shifts over time. When I began at the program I was only taking archiving classes amongst the core courses. These taught me a host of skills in film handling, critical research, and media cataloging. I have taken coursework that has provided me with experience in home movie description, digital archiving and restoration, transcription, and professional development within the media archiving field. When I switched over to the library track I shifted the type of coursework that I was taking as well. I have taken classes in children’s library services, public libraries, library programming, descriptive cataloging, and contemporary issues within the libraries. By taking an interdisciplinary approach to my coursework, I have been able to learn a wide range of curriculum that has exposed me to theories of the different disciplines and that has enabled me to learn much about a variety of areas within the field.
My Work Experience
While in school I was able to take two internships at different academic institutions. My primary internship was at the University of Southern California’s VKC library where I worked on the digitization and georeferencing of government planning documents for the city of Los Angeles. In this role I researched these government documents in order to correctly catalog them, digitized the textual and visual material, and through QGIS added the maps to an OSM file in order to publish this material through GitHub. The purpose of this project was to take materials that would otherwise be locked within a desk and publish them so that students within and outside of USC can access them for future research. My second internship was at Antioch University where I was a reference librarian for students. This position mostly entailed working with students to help them meet formatting requirements for APA and MLA citations however my job extended much further than that. I was able to help students with their assignments, essays, and research questions. This position was much more collaborative than the USC one and it allowed me to put what I’ve learned in the classroom into use. A unique thing that occurred in both of these positions during my work was the shift to remote work due to the pandemic. The shift forced me to focus on how to complete what I was doing without the same resources that I had when I was located in the physical location of each position. In addition to these two work experiences I had the ability to volunteer my time at places such as UCLA Powell Library’s AV Preservation Lab where I was given the ability to work with media materials in an professional archival setting.
My Experience in Professional Organizations
While my jobs and coursework have provided me with knowledge of and experience in the library and information science field, I have also taken on active roles in organizations related to the field, including my roles as the President of OUTReach, Treasurer of UCLA’s ALA chapter, Social Chair of the Student Governing Board, and member of a number of groups including AMIA, SLA, Artifacts, SCA, and Horn Press. For these organizations, I have been able to assist in the planning of events on campus from community-building programs to academic conferences. This experience has allowed me to meet other students and professionals in the field and to gain experience in event planning, program creation, and networking which I believe are all critical for any position in the library and information science field.
My Future Plans
My goals for the future are tied to academic librarianship. My main professional interest would be in collection development/curation because I want to work in developing strong library collections for institutional research as well as be able to show them off to the academic community at large. I would also be fine with visualization or reference and instruction librarianship as possible paths of opportunity in my professional life. I believe that the actual job title doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes down to what I want to achieve within a university setting. My main project as an academic librarian would be in the outreach that would connect the library to a specific program within the university, basically an inter-departmental collaboration effort based around research for the specific program. To put this into example if the collaboration is between the library and the geography department then connecting the students to map-based government documents within the library would be good for expanding research. In addition to this I intend to keep up with the major LIS organizations that I am currently a part of such as the American Library Association and the Special Libraries Association amongst others. I also hope to publish my work, either articles that I have written or articles that I wish to write in the future, in academic journals in the near future.