I’ve written a few posts this semester about my experience interviewing a senior librarian for a school assignment. We discussed the topic of the mentorship program within her library, its strengths and weaknesses, and the experiences of the people on both sides of the mentoring relationship. She gave me a little mentoring at the end of our chat, for which I am immensely grateful.
The assignment didn’t stop with the interview. I was required to draft a report for her, pretending that I was a management consultant and offering suggestions from management literature that could help improve the areas of concern in her mentorship program. The limitations of the assignment made it difficult to provide any depth of analysis of the issues or the recommendations, but I did my best within the page limit requirement. Most of the length was consumed by the annotated bibliography. After receiving approval from my professor, I submitted it to the librarian I had interviewed, and asked for some time to chat with her about its contents.
Where my professor had been focused on following proper APA7 style for my citations and had little to offer in terms of content analysis, the follow-up meeting with the librarian was the opposite. She’d clearly taken the time to not just skim my report, but read it thoroughly and investigate several of the bibliography entries before our meeting. She had feedback on content for each section of the report that demonstrated an understanding of the material, and related it to the existing state of the mentoring program and the efforts she was already taking to restructure it. For four of the five points she talked about how my findings aligned with her own views on the points, sometimes mentioning that it was something she had intended to do but hadn’t started yet. For the remaining point, she acknowledged the thought that went into it, but explained that she wasn’t intending to implement it, and why. No mention of the formatting or page count at all.
There was one point raised in the report that she said she hadn’t specifically considered. I had suggested that one of the ways to broaden the perspectives of mentees would be to seek mentorship from librarians outside of her particular library. This would allow for mentorship opportunities for all members of the library staff, including the senior librarians who currently run the mentorship program within the library. She said she’d had some experience with that herself through her work with ACRL, but hadn’t considered pursuing the same kind of opportunity within the mentorship program and coordinating such opportunities for her juniors.
The interaction that we were having was such an opportunity for me. In my university program, we have professors who assign coursework and review assignments, and we have academic advisors who help guide our course selection through the program. But just like there is no peer support provided, there also isn’t any real mentorship provided. I’ve had to look outside my own university for that opportunity. And I think that is something I will need to continue to work on, building my own mentorship program as a mentee from the ground up.
Our conversation turned to the topic of accessibility at the end. I had expressed my gratitude to her for meeting with me via a text-based chat program to accommodate my communication needs. She replied that she had found the text medium to be less stressful than she had originally anticipated, noting that she had time to compose her thoughts and less pressure to reply quickly. She called it relaxing, and said she hoped we could work together on future assignments this way. My internalized ableism always whispers in my ear that asking for accommodations is disruptive and unfair to the people around me, but the truth is that many non-disabled people benefit from the accommodations as much as the disabled do. Her words were an external validation of that idea, and I’m going to hold on to them for as long as I can. I too hope that we can stay in touch.