What a year!

What a difference twelve months makes. At this time last year, I was still employed as a software engineer at my previous company. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a good fit for me. Less than two months later, I would be unemployed with plenty of time to figure out my next steps.

To date:

- I’ve started graduate school at Wayne State University.
- I attended two library conferences: the Connecticut Library Association conference and the New England Library Association conference. I also live-blogged portions of the NELA conference.
- I applied for at least ten pre-professional library positions, interviewed at three of them and ultimately accepted a position with the third one. Whoohoo!
- I have been volunteering at a rural public library for the last six months.
- I’ve entered the E. J. Josey Award competition by modifying an old class assignment.
- I requested to serve on one of the ALA committees (I also requested to serve on a NMRT committee as well, but decided to hold off for the time being).

2009 has truly been a challenging year. I struggled with the decision to pursue my librarian dreams, especially in light of being unemployed during a recession and really feeling that I should do the “right” thing and take another software engineering job to support my family. I’m glad that I decided to follow my dreams just this once. I’ve met some wonderful librarians who are working on things that I’m interested in and I’m getting more and more excited about the prospect of working in a library full-time some day.

I’m looking forward to seeing what 2010 has in store for me.