set up a great internship for the summer

However, I’m pretty excited about the prospects. I have an internship opportunity working with the local public library system, at a branch library (yay!) that is close-ish to downtown and serves a wide variety of folks. No idea what I’ll be doing yet, but honestly, I’m game to do almost anything as long as it’s helpful and not a “make-work” situation…and as long as it fits the requirements of the internship.

Hoping to set up a meeting with my supervisor sooner rather than later!

So, just came across what seems like a FANTASTIC opportunity: a summer librarian job as the adult summer reading program manager at a tiny library in the Adirondacks. Paid internship basically, doing adult services and marketing, as well as general library staffing…at a small community library, which is totally what I’m interested in doing eventually.

Sigh. Only problem is, I’ve planned to attend a family reunion in Utah this summer – it’s not a long one, but it would require me to take a few days off at the end of June. Not sure if the people that hired me would be OK with that. But maybe they would be. Crap.

I should apply for the internship/summer job, right? And hope that we can work the reunion stuff out after? There’s no guarentee that I’ll get the job, so I should just go for it and worry about the schedule if it should work out. Right? Any advice here, 43Thing-ers?

I would have gotten started on this internship earlier in my school career. But I didn’t (though the digital library job was as good as or better than an internship experience-wise – I just didn’t get credit for it). The upside is that I will have all classes done (for both my degree and my advanced cert. in digital libraries!), except for the internship, within 2 years.

I’ve changed this to summer so that I actually have time to seek out an internship that will be really GREAT. One thing I’m going to do is see if I can get hooked up with OCPL via volunteering and make it obvious that I’m really interested in that library…also meet some more people, hopefully. This makes a truly great internship a bit more likely.

I’ve been advised to contact the personnel administrator at the library, but she is out of the country for the time being. I will check with her in January.

I don’t exactly have an “in” with them…but what I’m learning about my fellow librarians is that they are very gracious about answering unsolicited questions. So…I’m going out on a bit of a limb here, but I think what I will do is to contact the administrator that came to speak to my reference class last year. I’ll just briefly introduce myself, say that I’m looking for an internship, and that I’m really interested in doing my internship at a public library. We’ll see what happens.

Another avenue I will follow up on is the librarian I interviewed last year (again, for the reference class). He is head of reference at the local community college, and just a great guy.