Every once in a while I get an email out of the blue from a science student who's thinking of a career as a librarian and they want to know a bit about the field and it's job prospects.
I always respond very positively because I think science librarianship is a great career and that, on balance, the job prospects are pretty good.
Christina has a post up today with a little more detail:
If you are a scientist, but you want to get out of the lab, want to have a little more variety in your life, like helping people and finding information, but still want to use your science degree and be part of the scientific enterprise, then you might want to consider becoming a librarian.
You know a little about what a librarian does and if not you can see my recent post. Don't worry, though, all of those functions are not typically done by the same person. You don't have to be in public service, actually, you could deal with metadata or building discovery tools. You could even be in some sort of informatics.
There's a comment asking a few more specific questions and a bunch of the usual suspects have started chipping in with some responses.
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librarianing is something I did consider once, but ultimately I found I loved the lab too much :) I might think about it more when I'm older, maybe :D
"An alternate career..."
That should be "alternative" not "alternate".
"...the field and it's job prospects."
That should be "its" not "it's".
Pedantica: John's post is helpful, useful, valuable. Your contribution is none of those things.
John: thanks for a great blog.
Thanks, Lab Rat. Librarianship does make for a great second career. From the comments on Christina's post you can see that a bunch of us fall into that category.
Pedantica, thanks for the pointers. I'll fix the typos. Sadly, I've never been a very good proof reader of my own writing.
Ulrich, Amen. Thanks.