Hosted by the Kislak Center
This summer, we will be featuring blog posts written by PhD students who participated in Career Services’ Career Exploration Initiative (CEI), a program that helps doctoral candidates explore their career interests through networking opportunities with advanced degree professionals. Click here to learn more about CEI.
Through the CEI program, I worked with John Pollack and Alicia Meyer, two curators at the Kislak Center. Both John and Alicia graduated from Penn’s English department, so I knew they would have valuable advice for transitioning from the PhD to working with special collections. Before I started at Penn, I’d earned my master’s degree in library science and worked in an archive, so I wasn’t totally new to special collections.
Even so, I hoped that John and Alicia would be able to introduce me to the idiosyncrasies of the Kislak Center, broadening my understanding of how various special collections libraries and archives work, and help me better understand how my PhD would prepare me for a future career in special collections.Â
Although there are many different aspects of working with special collections that we discussed, I was most interested in instruction. Both John and Alicia kindly shared their own approaches to instruction—I learned how they handle teaching both in terms of logistics and policies as well as more philosophically. I think my doctoral training will be particularly helpful as I devise my own pedagogical practice around teaching with special collections.
I look forward to working closely with John and Alicia as I complete my PhD. In addition to doing research in the reading room and bringing future classes for visits, I’ll be coordinating a workshop for the English department this fall to introduce graduate students to archival research at the Kislak Center. I look forward to incorporating some of John and Alicia’s best practices into that workshop.
