Tag Archives: new jobs

Full Speed Ahead

16 Apr

“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.” ~ Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

I came out of an 8 o’clock meeting on Monday morning with the thought, “Well, at least I still have the whole week ahead for things to improve.” They didn’t. Not really. Not until today. It’s been a difficult week.

One of the steepest learning curves of a new job is less often the tasks at hand, but more learning the people. People make life really great, really difficult, and everything in between. That’s pretty much how it goes, unless we live alone on an island. And no one lives alone on an island. Except Tom Hanks in that movie a few years back. Even then, he had Wilson. My work during the earlier part of the week was not critiqued by inanimate objects and/or sporting equipment. It was reviewed and editorialized and shredded to bits before being put back together into something that only marginally resembled what I started off with by people. I admit it … it hurt. And yes, it also made me a little angry.

I had to do a lot of self-talk to keep going. I said to myself, “If someone you know came to you and expressed to you what you’re feeling right now, you would tell them without hesitation that it takes a lot of courage to take chances, to try new things, to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone.” But if you’re like me, you probably find it much easier to encourage others than to do the same for yourself.

There was, of course, nothing personal in the assessment of the work that I’d done. I had to speak before the Committee on Scientific Research Affairs to explain the findings of a user survey that I carried out for a core service recently. I was representing my department in what I was saying and those who are responsible for it just wanted to make sure that I said the right things, in the right way, to highlight the right points. Still, while it may not have been intentional, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being spoken to like I was a complete newcomer to this business, as if I had never presented anything to any audience ever before.

I walked into my house on Monday night and shouted to my animals, “DON’T THEY KNOW WHO I AM?!?!?!” (It’s good to have animals during moments like this. They never judge you for any angst-ridden, bruised-ego-induced outbursts.)

As I talked about it more with my spouse later that evening and then I paid attention to it more during meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday, I realized a couple of things. First, the folks that I work for and with now DON’T know who I am. I get invited to speak at conferences, be on task forces, elected to offices in the world of libraries because my peers in these organizations do know me. They know what I do well. They know how I say things, how I do things, how I believe certain things and express them. And yes, it is a nice ego boost when people like you and respect you for those very things; when they like you and respect you for yourself. But it takes awhile for people to get to know you. It takes work and efforts and showing up and volunteering and writing a blog post week after week.

I have none of this going for myself right now and let me tell you, it’s hard. It’s harder than I thought it would be.

But I also noticed a second thing about my new environs this week and that’s that there is a tendency for people to work collaboratively in a way that is more critical than perhaps I’m used to. On Tuesday morning, I worked for two and a half hours with a couple of docs (an MD and a PhD) on the same presentation. We talked through everything. Every piece – not just what I’d put together, but what they’d put together, too – was up for critique. Everything got moved around and rearranged. Parts got lopped off. I was struggling again to hear people telling me that I needed to say something this way, not that way.

Again, I wanted to shout, “I know how to talk to people, for <expletive> sake!!” But along the way somewhere, I was able to step back from my frustrations and hurt feelings a moment to realize we were all in this together. The process that I was a part of was simply the process that’s the norm for these people. The people who I don’t know and who don’t know me, but yet we work together now.

Yes, I do think that the steepest learning curve involves learning the new people. Coming out of yesterday morning’s presentation, one of my new co-workers said to me, “You’re pretty good at that.” I replied, “Yes, I know. And thanks for saying so.”

We’re getting to know each other. Full speed ahead!

Damn the torpedoes!

Damn the torpedoes!

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The Great Candy Cane Caper

29 Dec

There I was merrily absorbed in the holiday spirit, running my daily Jingle Bell 5K and sharing a candy cane a day with my dear blog readers, when all of the sudden …

SCREECH!!!

It may be more appropriate to say that my two feet hit the gas pedal – VAROOOOOOM!!! – than the brakes, but regardless of how you see it, my holiday streaks were tossed off the rooftops and my blog posting has been MIA for 2+ weeks now. That said, I refuse to let 2014 close without one final post, so here goes:

If you read my last post (12/15), you know that as of that date I began a new job as a Research Evaluation Analyst for the University of Massachusetts Center for Clinical and Translational Science. I still work at the UMass Medical School campus (right down the hall from the Library), still enjoying all of the relationships I’ve built over the years. In fact, it’s those very relationships – both around the campus and in the larger academic medical library world – that helped me land this job. And while it’s immensely different in so many ways from the work that I’ve been doing for the past years as an embedded research librarian and informationist, it’s also a position that will allow me to expand on many of the skills I honed during that time.

So what am I doing now? That’s a question pretty much everyone, with the exception of my new colleagues in the UMCCTS, has asked. Right now, I’m working madly with the rest of the grant writing team, pulling everything together before the January 15th proposal deadline. The UMCCTS is funded through a Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health, a 5-year grant that expires this year. As you can imagine, I came on board at one heckuva time to come on board. I’ve been playing catch up and keep up at the same time; reading accepted, past proposals from other universities, reading articles on the state of evaluation of the CTSA program as a whole, reading articles on different evaluation research from individual CTSA awardees, and reading the many different components of our own proposal in their many different iterations. 

And I’ve been writing; writing a section on the measurement and evaluation program for our Center as a whole, writing annotated versions of the evaluation pieces for the individual components, writing tables and charts, and writing my list of all the people that I’ll send Christmas presents and/or cards to after the middle of January. What I’ll be doing after the grant goes in (and, fingers crossed, gets awarded) is working on all of the evaluation pieces and projects that I’ve spent these weeks describing. I’ll also be working actively with other CTSA award sites, in particular their evaluation teams, on collaborative research projects that will help us determine the effectiveness of the program on a national level. It’s in this latter part that I’ll get to maintain a number of librarian connections, as well as build some new networks of colleagues (and, if evaluators are like librarians, friends).

Do I like it? That’s the other question I get of late. Honestly, I don’t know yet. I like the subject of evaluation and measuring the impact of research. I like the bits that I was able to dabble in while working in the Library. I like research. I like reading and learning new things. I like seeing UMMS from a different perspective. I like the people. I even like the change of pace, even in its whirlwind form. I’m glad that I followed-up on an opportunity and that it’s come to be what it is right now, but it’s still awfully early in the change; too early to give a definitive “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” 

My highlighted, coffee-stained notebook from that year of hard study. Despite the years, I've never been able to throw it out.

My highlighted, coffee-stained notebook from that year of hard study. Despite the years, I’ve never been able to throw it out.

However, what this early experience reminds me most of is being in graduate school. In particular, it reminds me of the amount of time and effort and work that was involved in learning all of the systemic and cellular physiological mechanisms of exercise for the two courses I took on that subject. I can clearly remember one very bright, sunny, Saturday afternoon in late fall, sitting at the conference table in the room on the 2nd floor of the health sciences building (outside the grad students’ office) with my good friend and classmate, Suzanne Connolly (say it with an Irish accent), working our way through every little step and every confounded enzyme and every change in positive or negative ions to open this or that Calcium channel … all to make one heart beat happen. I can remember talking it through over and over, drawing pictures on the white board, trying to get it, to understand the process, to put all of the pieces together in my head until finally …  BLING!! … the lightbulb went on. And I remember feeling REALLY satisfied. Because it was hard. It was hard, but I’d stuck with it until I got it. And I think that’s why this study day memory stands out so clearly in my memory bank.

I’ve felt that way at other times, too; learning a particular riff on the mandolin or learning to cross-country ski. It takes focus and effort. And it’s about learning, not necessarily about competence. I was (am) a very competent librarian. There was certainly a period of time, early in my career, when I had to put forth a good bit of focus and effort to learn something new, but whenever you’ve been doing something for a good while, the amount of effort you have to expend towards the work decreases. You may still spend the same amount of time and you may still have the same amount (or even more) tasks to attend to, but the amount of effort is different. You’re efficient at what you do. You may not be completely on auto-pilot, but you can probably get to and from work without always remembering the drive.

My first couple of weeks (less a 2-day Christmas break) have been about learning. I’m a long way from being a competent evaluator. The learning curve is steep and challenging, but when I feel overwhelmed, I remember that study day and I remember piano recitals and I remember cruising along on the successes that came from the hard work of learning to be a good librarian. I remember the satisfaction that came with those experiences and I trust that in time, I’ll enjoy the same in my new role. 

Between here and there, I’ll keep sharing the journey. After all, a librarian by any other name is … still a librarian.

 

 

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