Laurabelle's Blog

I've got this weird attitude about my job title. Formally I'm the ITS Student Intern, but I don't act like an intern. Or maybe I do, because this is the only real internship I've ever had (barring the very short time I spent at the Museum der Arbeit in Hamburg, where I talked to everyone I could but did only a smattering of actual work). I don't know if my experience is typical. The stereotypical intern brews coffee and makes copies, but I don't. I feel like a regular employee, not an intern.

There's also the issue of respect. Last summer, when I started responding to patrons who had emailed in, Meg suggested that I remove the job title from my sig because patrons might think that my answer is not authoritative or that their emails were being handled by just an intern. So I don't include that line in my emails to patrons, but I still feel slightly rebellious. Why shouldn't I have pride in being an intern? Why should I hide it? Shouldn't I flaunt it and show the world the marvellous work that interns can do?

Within KCLS I have encountered only respect, though that is probably due to the advocacy of Kathy and other staff members who know my expertise. Outside the system, I don't know. What do people see when I say intern?

I think my job title hurt me in my last interview. I didn't know how to express that only my first six months were really an internship. When Meg left, I ran the system for the first three or four weeks until Kathy got more or less up to speed. I fixed things, I submitted support requests, I responded to queries from both staff and patrons. I was working 20 hours per week at that point, and it was crazy, but I did it all. I also taught Kathy about Dynix and about libraries in general. Since then, Kathy has taken over lots of the major maintenance duties (such as harassing Dynix to fix things, which is easier for her to do because of her job title and experience and because she's in the office five days a week, unlike me), but I'm still the Recall guru. I take on a lot of special projects like doing custom reports for people or cleaning up the database. Almost none of my duties are assigned by Kathy. If you ask her, I'm not an intern any more.

The reason SPL gave for not hiring me is that I didn't have enough experience. Now, it may be true that other applicants had more, but I think the word intern hurt me. They asked for two years of experience with library automation systems, and I have a year of hard experience with Dynix (the system that SPL uses as well). I have no doubt that I can do that job. How can I make people see the value of the work I do, regardless of what my badge says?