See: Librarian, Former, Part 2

I started library school at the University of North Texas in the fall 2006 semester, excited to go back to school to become a librarian. One of my colleagues at work suggested I take the Web Development courses, a set of two electives offered that would count toward my total credits needed for the General Program of Study I was pursuing, and they sounded interesting to me, so I did.

That fall, while I learned all about how information is organized—a foundational concept of librarianship, I discovered I had a real affinity for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which were the focus for the first Web Development course. I enjoyed working with markup and styling my HTML, but I really enjoyed using JavaScript to manipulate the DOM.

In the following spring, I learned about the different types of reference work (primarily handling reference, referral, and directional requests), and important best practices for providing assistance to patrons. I also learned PHP, SQL, MySQL, and how to interact with REST APIs using JSON, and a whole new world opened up for me. I could build complex, interactive Web applications and write complicated SQL queries. What's more, I found I really enjoyed it, which surprised me.

Here, I feel compelled to insert a story from Halloween 2003 to explain my surprise. While waiting for a friend to get off work so we could go to a costume party, another friend and I went to see a psychic. As I previously mentioned, at this point in my life, I had no idea what I was going to do with my career, so my question for the psychic was centered on seeing that future. She told me something shocking: "I see you working with computers." I thought she was nuts.

But here I was three years later, "working with computers" and loving it. It took me 18 months to complete library school, during which I also took a course on Readers' Advisory and one on Indexing—two courses which also impacted my career after library school in different ways. After graduation, I got a job with the Houston Public Library as a Readers' Advisory Librarian.

This role was a part of the Adult Programming and Outreach team, so in addition to devising and managing services for readers, I also got to collaborate with local partners and coordinate book clubs, author visits, and other reading-related programs. My favorite parts of the work, though, were managing the "For Adults" section of the library's website, managing our monthly and bimonthly newsletters that were provided through an EBSCO service, and creating and managing the library's new online readers' advisory service.

But more important to me than any of the specific work I was doing, I had a professional career. I had found "my people" and established my identity. I thought I would work as a librarian forever, but in just over five years, I would be moving on to something new.