About the New Job…

Mood:  Fuzzheaded
Music: When In Rome, by Nickel Creek (check them out, seriously)

As you probably know, I have a new job.  How this job came to me is something of an amazing story, so I think I’ll tell it.

About last October, I started wondering if I was doing the right thing by staying at Seminary.  By December I was on the verge of going crazy obsessing about it.  By January, I was going insane.  By February, I had close friends and mentors sit me down and tell me I needed to seek professional help.  They were completely serious, and they were right.  By April, I had made my decision:  I was coming back to Wisconsin, and taking a break from Seminary.

This presented a couple of new problems, however.  The first problem was that if  I was going to take a break from Seminary and move back to WI, I was going to have to find another job.  The second problem (and one I’m just now starting to address) is how I finish Seminary once I’d left Denver.  It’s not as though it seemed very likely to me, even then, that I would, after my year off, move BACK to Colorado.  So what of Seminary?  I’ll let you know about that as it is revealed to me.  As it is now, I’ll probably transfer to either North Park or Trinity, both in the metro-Chicago area.  Now about the resolution of the job situation.

When I was home for Christmas, I had a person I knew tell me, somewhat confidentially, that the school I had done my student-teaching at, near my hometown, would be hiring a couple of English teachers.  Considering my passion for teaching, and my good relationship with the school that was doing the hiring, plus the added assurance of this person in the district, I felt pretty good about my chances of getting one of the teaching jobs. 

About February, I heard from the president of the Historical Society for my denomination, and she wanted me to post a job description for the job they had available to head up their organization.  As I was posting the job description where she had requested, I began thinking about what I would do if I had the job.  To my surprise, I discovered that I had about a million thoughts on what should be done, and in what order it should be done.  But because I thought the teaching job was such a lock, I didn’t even really think much about it.  I put it aside, and thought that I might just send an email with my ideas to the new person.  (thinking back on it now, it amazes me how often those "sure things" are neither sure nor a thing worth considering at all….)

Well, by now, you’ve probably figured out what happened.  I didn’t get the teaching job AGAIN.  (This was the same school I applied for right when I graduated college.)  I have my theories about why that is, but I guess it doesn’t really matter.  I did end up with this Historian job, which ended up being both better for me, a better fit, and better for my situation….better pay, better work, better everything.

The job is quite enormous.  There hasn’t been a full time person in the position I’ve got right now since the mid 90’s.  Because my official title is Librarian-Historian, I am being asked to do some work in maintaining a library, something I’ve never done before.  I’m taking a class this fall in basic library science to try and catch up to the learning curve on this.  Luckily, the library isn’t big, so it shouldn’t take too long (hopefully) to get it into some semblance of order.  I have lots of ideas of what I would like to see done with our collection here, but I need to learn more before I can tell myself if the ideas I’ve got are any good.  The basic reason I was hired was to automate the library.  Our library isn’t yet on a computer database for the card cataloguing and indexing.  It’s something that needed to be done, and now, starting on or about the first of the year, I’ll be working on that almost exclusively.  Until then, I’m working at getting a website up and running and cleaning everything up so that it’s ready to go when we get trained on the software.

I’m also asked to represent my employers among other Baptist groups at conferences, and do some academic writing, which is something I enjoy doing.  The administrative part of my job is a bit intimidating, just because I’ve never done it.  Luckily, there isn’t a terrible amount of administration to do.  I don’t have to supervise anyone, and there is relatively little for me to oversee.  I do have some perks now (a travel budget, a continuing ed budget), but enormous responsibilities that go with them (people give money to this organization and expect to see results with the money they give—Welcome to the "real world" Nick!)  Basically, I have to make sure I do my job the way I’m supposed to, which is challenge enough for right now.

Well, that’s all I can think to write about this right now, except to say this:  I love my new job.  It suits me right down to the last hair on my head.  I have a huge variety of things I can do from day to day, and I greatly enjoy it.  I like the people I work with, and I like the ability to kind of immerse myself in the history of my people and see how we have come along in the faith in the past years.   All things considered, everything has worked out better than I might have dreamed last October.   Now about next October….*winks*