jackflaps:

I’m just not in the room where they do that. So in ten years, I’d like to be in the room where they do that. Ideally I could make that happen without having to get a Ph.D. in information science or a master’s in urban planning, because those things are expensive and I’m already $25,000 in the red from Carleton, but I think if it was brutally necessary I’d find a way to deal with that. Jobs like this don’t exist, though, and also I live in a forest where nobody cares about urban planning.

This is way after the fact (Tumblr outage plus end-of-semester craziness interfered) but I just wanted to say that one semester into library school, I already feel like I’m in the same boat, and I’ll be interested to see what kind of path you take.

I’m interested in broadband / community technology / community development policy, and I’m getting tons of hands-on experience in the Community Informatics track here at GSLIS, but I’m not seeing any practitioner-level jobs where you can make even close to an acceptable or stable living, and I sort of need health insurance to stay alive and stuff. I’d prefer to build a reputation through practice and work my way up to the policy level that way, but I’m just not seeing the path there. Even with policy, I’m not seeing the kind of career track that justifies going way in debt and getting a Ph.D when I’m not particularly interested in the tenured faculty rat race or in doing hyper-focused and rigorous research (that’s likely of dubious practical value to anyone) in areas where I could learn a lot more and be a better policy maker through practice.

It looks like the best path is probably entrepreneurial, whether starting an organization or a business or what have you, but I’m not really interested in or skilled at that either. I kind of need someone else with business, marketing, management, and begging skills to do that for me, but I don’t see anyone lining up to do that. I’m really not sure how to get from here to there, though hopefully the next year or so of school will give me a more of a sense. Right now the fallback plan is to work at a public or community college library, and try to do cool community outreach and tech/info literacy stuff in that context, but I’m afraid that will always be doomed to be a sidelight in most such settings, especially with the resource constraints we’ll be under and the stage of my career I’ll be in.