From the ALA:
Mean librarian salaries up 2% in 2008
Analysis of data from more than 1,010 public and academic libraries showed that the mean salary for librarians with ALA-accredited master’s degrees increased 2% from 2007, up $1,151 to $57,809. The median ALA MLS salary was $53,251, and salaries ranged from $22,000 to $331,200. Results are reported in the 2008 edition of the ALA-APA Salary Survey: Librarian—Public and Academic, published by the ALA–Allied Professional Association….
So my summer internship is over and it’s back to California tomorrow. I’m excited to get back to Victor, and Arty, and California friends. And I’m excited to start my new job at Berkeley’s bioscience library. I like work, and I’m going to be doing some challenging stuff and, doubtlessly, learning a lot. But I’m reluctant to re-assume all the trappings of working life.
Travis and I were just talking about this when I was visiting him over this past weekend. One of the nice things about this summer internship was the fact that I had work, without all the trappings of work. I could show up to work smelling like fish cause I’d just helped to pick gillnets, and that was cool with everyone cause they smelled like fish too. There was certainly no expectation of looking nice, or having showered, or any of that. Commuting consisted of walking across the street from the chicken coop to the office, although sometimes I did have to walk across the street in the rain. I could work extra hours on four days to scamper off early for the weekend on Friday.
So even though I’m excited to start work at Berkeley, I’m mentally rebelling against the need to dress (and smell) nice again, to commute again, to adhere to a schedule again. I’m particularly unexcited about the commute - I’ll be taking BART, which is nice cause I’ll be able to read on the train, but it’s going to be around an hour in each direction, all told. That bumps my workweek from 40 hrs to 50 hrs, right there.
So all this is making me feel particularly determined to find a close-to-ideal situation when I’m done with school next May. I doubt I’ll be able to find a job that allows me to show up smelling like fish (and I guess I can live with that). But I want to be picky about where the job is located (Victor and I want to move back east to be close to our families), and where we live in relation to the job, and the character of the town that we live in, whether it holds opportunities for Victor as well as myself, whether it’s a place where we’ll want to spend some time. Hopefully there will be enough opportunities when I graduate that I’ll be able to exercise some amount of pickiness - maybe my resolutions will melt away in the light of the reality of the situation. Victor and I have both made a few sacrifices for the sake of library school and my fledgling career (thank you, Victor); nothing major, but we’ve still made some decisions that have steered our lives away from how we’d ideally like to live. I’m hoping that with my first professional job, we’ll be able to re-adjust our priorities back to be more in line with our ideals.