I’ve discovered a real problem, folks: most of the people I really want to work with–whose books, ideas, blogs, and podcasts have most influenced my thinking over this semester and who I think have the greatest chance of effecting real change in technology policies and practices (if anybody would just listen to them)–are pretty much all lawyers. (Why are lawyers the ones writing all of these books? Why isn’t it librarians? I think this is something worth discussing and would love to hear from some library-related folk why they think we’re falling so short on this stuff!)
I just don’t know that they want an engineer-turned-librarian following them around all the time, no matter how smart or devoted to their various causes I might be, since they all work in law-related organizations–with quite a lot of overlap between them, if you look at the whole timeline. I also don’t think I’ve got the wherewithal to go to school for three more years, at $100k+ a year, to then end up working with them and the EFF and never paying off my loans. It took some soul-searching to go from engineering to library science and to take on the loans I have. Also, I am really kind of pondering a PhD in LIS, instead, though the question of “now or later?” is still very up in the air–and very dependent on who has the coolest/best/most socially relevant projects for me to work on next year.
(A post to come soon: I identify people within the library field who are also working on interesting and relevant things, of similar importance, in a very different way. I’ve got a couple, already.)
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