Application application application...

The start of the end of my traineeship was confirmed on Tuesday by the interviews held in the library for my successor. However, the subjection of 5 poor people to a tour by yours truly, a written cat-'n'-class test and off-the-wall interview questions from the esteemed Prof. Paul Cartledge was the end of a long application process for us in the office, because it took us around 3 weeks to select these 5 names from amongst 176 application forms.

Yes. 176 applications for a 1 year fixed contract trainee librarian post.

Job applications can seem like a lottery,
but you can take control...
Photo from http://koongajobs.co.uk/

Without focusing too much on what this statistic says about the job market more generally, we received applications from a huge range of ages (5 different decades), nationalities (Zambia to Canada via Lithuania) and levels of experience, from the 21-year-old graduate-to-be to people with doctorates, or those looking to change careers altogether. Yet all these people are filling in the same form for the same job and looking to catch the eye of someone at the other end. So where did 5 succeed where 171 failed? Here are my tips for filling in application forms (as a disclaimer: these are based solely on my personal observations and my (exceedingly limited) experience of the job search) :

1. Just like in exams, read the form and all instructions on it properly. Writing your education history down in order with the most recent first may seem like a minor trifle, but when it gets difficult to narrow forms down, then attention to detail can be vital.

2. Lots of forms include space for a personal statement or a blurb about your suitability of the role. Within the constraints of an application form this is your opportunity to show off your personality and your interest, so make the most of it!

• Don't leave any blank space (but do resist the temptation to write 20 pages). 
• Address all essential AND desirable criteria stated in the job's further particulars. 
• Make your statement as specific and as relevant to that one job as possible (and if you're filling loads of forms in, make sure you send the right ones to the right places!). 
• Apply everything that you say about yourself and your experience to the target job. 
• Try to convey your enthusiasm for the position without using increasingly cliched phrases; as an example, the word "passionate" loses its punch after the 50th reading...

3. Proofreading is as important with a form as with a CV or covering letter, and remember that it ISN'T cheating to ask a friend or family member to have a scan through.

4. Typing the form is probably better than handwriting it (especially if your handwriting is hard to read - be self-critical on this one!) but then make sure that the formatting on the form works. There's nothing worse than claiming to be computer literate when the form doesn't fit on the page properly and half the boxes on it are misshapen.

5. Lots of books about job searching techniques recommend making first contact with the employer, but really it's better only to do that with a genuine query, for example, "Am I overqualified for this position?" or "A family member is my employer, is this an acceptable referee?" If you ask really basic questions just to touch base, you risk looking like you can't make decisions for yourself.

It's an incredibly tough job market at the moment and frankly, the estimate of 83 applicants per graduate job seems conservative at best in the face of my recent experience.

But to all jobseekers, and particularly the very worthy people who weren't successful with us : please don't give up hope, keep taking the time to produce quality applications and your opportunities will come...

(P.S. Congrats to the one that did make it - I look forward to working with you in September!)

Thing 3: Reams of Substance and Subjects or Rhetoric and Surplus Stanzas?

RSS feeds: funnelling the information to you,
but what's the best way to digest it?
Photo from: jews4barack.com

I've been looking forward to this Thing as I was never sure that I'd fully understood RSS feeds and how to use them. Luckily it is Really Simple, Stupid and I feel a lot more confident about how to go about them. In the name of fidelity to the course I had a sneak peek at Google Reader - as with many of the other Google programs it's handy to have under the same umbrella as my beloved Gmail, but yet again it all seems a bit cluttered to me and frankly not as intuitive as other aspects of the Google brand. I may, however, have to give it another chance on a slightly faster browser than the achingly slow Internet Explorer at work and spend a little more time on it.

One other reason that I'm loath to do so, however, is because I can set up RSS feeds incredibly easy on my Netvibes page (see Thing 1 continued) - I've even set up a dedicated tab so I can keep my feeds in one place without them getting all mixed in together as on Google Reader, though admittedly this may only work while I have a relatively small number of feeds. The latest Cambridge Lindy Hopper gossip? At my desktop in a click. Sunday Postsecrets? Here you are madam, no need for all that typing. All the Cam23 updates? On a platter.

And the REAL meaning of RSS (selon moi)? Receiving and Sharing Sources. What a librarian-like tool, don't you think?

Thing 2: The Metablog and Extra Thing 1: Blog Beautification

What could be more self-referential than a blogpost about blogging? Not much, but this will be an excellent exercise in constant and simultaneous reflection, it seems.

Blogging does not equal diarising
Photo: http://www.writingequipment.com/tag/journalling

I started this blog before Cam23's renaissance, though not so long before as to be completely confident and au fait with this blogging lark. I had always resisted blogs because they seemed somewhat self-indulgent. I wasn't convinced that I had anything to say that would really be worth reading and the last thing I wanted to do was to find myself writing an online diary, full of mundane and personal stuff which should be confined to a pretty notebook underneath the mattress.

Would a view like this inspire me, or is it all a question of practice?
(Photo: Writing Sunset Italy-Roma
by http://www.flickr.com/photos/gnuckx/3491709853/)

However, my aversion to blogging had to be confronted after an engaging talk by Jane Secker at LSE (for full details, see my blog post of 7th May here), in which she outlined the importance of a PhD student's online presence and how tools like blogging can be used to share ideas and initiate discourse with people all over the world. As a postgrad-to-be, it seemed that there was no time like the present to get to grips with the software and the medium in order to make the most of them once I'm actually a fully-fledged Linguistics student once more. In addition to and as an extension of this, I thought it would be useful to practise writing again, as I hadn't written any kind of extended prose since submitting my baby (my one and only published article to date) in October 2010. I love reading and I will devour anything - fiction, biographies, histories, poetry - but I long to produce something myself, as well as just being able to enjoy the fruits of other people's labours. The magnum opus has not yet begun, but I feel that this blog is slowly bringing my creative and wordy side back to the surface after too long a period of hibernation...I promise nothing in the very near future, but hopefully the mist of creativity will descend fairly soon! 

As I mentioned, I'm an avid reader and, to my credit or detriment I don't know, quite a nosey person, so having a poke around other Cam23 blogs has become quite a pastime already! I was already a bit of a lurker on Annie, Katie, Jen and Erin's blogs (just a hint of grad trainee solidarity there), but of my more recent discoveries I particularly like Jenny's writing style, and I went back on Anna's Pocket Universe blog to discover her incredibly attractive Bewitched-esque new theme, of which I am very much a fan!

A very pretty font, but a strain on slow internet connections and
older browsers...and is it professional enough?
Font from http://www.ffonts.net/Calligraffiti.font

On the theme of themes, for the Extra Thing my blog also underwent a bit of a revamp - in the excitement of using a new tool, I initially had a very bright, busy theme with all the brush-style fonts I could cram in. It was also incredibly pink and girly which, as people close to me would know, is in no way representative of my appearance or personality! Consequently I've now opted for a much cleaner theme which is less cluttered, the basic fonts are easier to load on all browsers and the blog posts, not the borders, are the focus. I know the book image may be a smidge clichéd but I thought a nod towards libraries would be welcome, seeing as my blog title isn't at all book related. Where I allow a bit more colour and imagination in is with the pictures that I attach to each blogpost - each image should enhance and relate to the subject matter but also liven it up a little and break up the text. 

I hope that my blog conveys something of my personality without becoming overly personal; that I am a professional, analytical person with something to contribute, but that I also know how to smile.

Thing 1 continued: Good (Net)Vibrations

After giving iGoogle a go and coming away distinctly underwhelmed, I thought, "Wouldn't it be Nice if there was a similar kind of platform, but one that provides a clearer, cleaner and more flexible interface?"

A more traditional dashboard than the
ones we're playing with
Photo: http://www.dragondriving.co.uk

It's not quite as intuitive to use, but with Netvibes there is no cluttered sidebar or slavish adherence to the promotion of Google products; instead the only tabs are user-created and line up along the top of the "dashboard" (which I'm rapidly realising is the web 2.0 buzzword - quite a departure from its original meaning, which was a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud which would literally dash itself against the board). The selection of widgets on offer is also much wider and generally more useful - as ever, you do have to be careful about the searchterms you use - the results for "blogger" were particularly interesting - but I found them much easier to manipulate, as you can choose how they display new material (headline, slideshow, news ticker) and my particular favourite was a 'link widget' which allows you to turn websites which may not have widgets into bookmarks on your dashboard, meaning that everything can be attached to the dashboard and will help break the habit of defaulting to my browser-based favourites.

Geeking out with language tools on Netvibes

I also played around with the tabs on Netvibes, creating a Travel tab (thanks for the idea Jenny), a Blogs tab for all my RSS feeds (I'm a complete newbie on this one but hopefully Thing 3 will clue me up), and a Languages tab for all the dictionaries and translators I usually use (iate.europa.eu and dict.leo.org are respectable, I request any serious linguists not to judge me for using WordReference though!) I do some freelance translation and proofreading, as well as being lucky enough to use my foreign languages regularly in the Classics library, so having all those tools at one glance will be incredibly useful. Not to mention that the strawberry theme will be Keepin' the Summer Alive all year round.

I haven't yet ventured out into the wide world of public pages, à la Annie, but I'm becoming increasingly comfortable with the new things I'm encountering, which bodes well for the rest of the programme, extending All Summer Long...

Thing 1: Google goggles on...or off?

One of my favourite Google doodles to date: taking inspiration
from the great dancer, Martha Graham (seen 11th May 2011)

Being a longterm devotee of Gmail, I have had some experience with other Google products, such as Google docs and Blogger and have generally found them simple and satisfying to use - taking Gmail as an example, it blew Hotmail and Yahoo out of the water by keeping emails in conversations, by being far less prone to bugs and spam, and by allowing you to log in to other services without having 101 usernames and passwords. The way that it marks different correspondents in different colours also greatly appealed to my girly side.

Google's reputation for innovation and imagination (not to mention imperiousness and monopoly) is fearsome, yet one innovation that had not yet reached me was iGoogle. On my home computer I have my trusty favourites bar (and a subconscious order in which I visit each link) which mostly consists of Hermes, Gmail, Facebook and BBC Sport. These four sites must constitute around 95% of the sites I visit, and are generally the source of inspiration for the other 5%. For this reason, iGoogle appealed in that it would even minimise the four clicks it usually takes me to get around, and could well act as a new kind of segway into other sources of information.

The utterly pointless real age calculator.
That's not my real age, just to be clear...

I found the groundwork for iGoogle to be pretty easy (aside from the theme, which kept randomly changing on me), but I was somewhat underwhelmed by the result, as I gather many other 23Thingers have been. It is handy to have my lines of contact at a glance, but the rest of the stuff was lost on me, as I either wasn't interested in what happened to be showing at the time, or couldn't see enough of it for it to have an impact, so I ended up going on the parent site anyway. The proliferation of widgets was something else which put a dampener on it, as it seemed to be quite difficult to root out the quality from the slews of rubbish such as the "real age calculator" (put in your date of birth and we'll tell you how old you are...no, really...)

Grand Corps Malade: Roi du slam
français (photo: www.glenscolan.fr)

As iGoogle didn't really do it for me, I'm currently in the middle of taking a leaf out of Annie's book and trying something different - I'm also going for Netvibes, which, despite being a lot more complicated at face value, is already providing more for me in terms of widgets and feeds which fit my interests. I was greatly surprised at the number of hits for Slam poetry, something I'm returning to after first encountering it on my year abroad (sorry about the French link, but it describes the French slam scene better than the English link). Just wait 'til podcast week!

But until then, I'll get back to you on my Netvibe travails, as piles of cataloguing are eyeing me maliciously...

The start of a beautiful Web 2.0 professional development programme...

So I have been a little lax with posting in the last couple of weeks, but I have a good excuse m'lud, and it's very much Blogger related.

It's been a while in the planning,
but now it's here...

I have in fact been neglecting this blog for another, namely that of the Cam23 2.0 programme that I'm running along with several other Cambridge librarians, including 3 other trainees. The idea is to try out 23 new web 2.0 tools over a period of 3 months, basically to keep interest and personal/professional development going during the long summer vacation. As you may have guessed, this is actually the second series, the first having been so successful that there are lots of Cambridge newcomers who want a pop at it, along with those who didn't quite finish last time or those who enjoyed it so much that they want another go, particularly at the eight extra "Things" we're offering this year.

All of this has required quite a lot of time and effort; organising what Things should be included, drafting and publishing blog posts, designing little flyers and holding a launch party, the latter of which took place at the UL last Friday. Yours truly gave a (very brief) presentation about what to expect and how to join in, and there are a fair few people registered already, and hopefully many more to come!

It's an exciting programme to be involved in; I'm looking forward to trying out some of the Things that I haven't really used/done before, such as podcasting, but it's also great for my personal development to be involved in organising, writing for and supporting others through a programme which needs to be as professional and as slick as possible. Watch this space (literally...I have to take part as well!)

And importantly, my involvement in Cam23 2.0 could well be one of my last Cambridge hurrahs, as I've been lucky enough to secure ESRC 1+3 funding for postgraduate study in Linguistics at York, starting in October. I'm incredibly excited about the opportunity to work with some of the foremost scholars in linguistics at present, especially as my interests in psycho- and neurolinguistics seem to align so well with theirs. But there's 3 1/2 months left to go in Cambridge and I intend to make every moment count.

News just in: Bilingualism will save your life! Well, kind of...

OK, so that title may be just a little sensationalist, but the neurological advantages of being bilingual did make the homepage of the New York Times this week, thanks to this interview with the highly-esteemed Professor Ellen Bialystok (U.York, Toronto), one of the foremost scholars of bilingualism today.

It's fantastic to see current topics in linguistics getting the limelight they deserve, particularly because language, language use and the advantages thereof affect millions and millions of people worldwide every second, even if they don't take much time to think about it. It's also good to see linguistics increasingly recognised as a science, with studies and experiments and analyses of outcomes just as rigorous as anything you'll find in any of the traditional sciences.

Could studies on bilinguals rewrite this diagram?
Image from whatthehealthmag.wordpress.com

That's enough hyperbole for now though - more important is what Professor Bialystok had to say. Her area of study is bilingual adults, and she has found that cognitive functioning in bilinguals resists the normal ageing process better than in monolinguals. Furthermore, symptoms of that terrible condition, Alzheimer's, emerge much slower in bilinguals than in monolinguals. This all points to some very interesting things going on the brains of bilinguals, and Bialystok even suggests that the networks and "wiring" in the brain can be very different in bilinguals, to the point that language centres are successfully being used for completely non-verbal tasks.

I greatly look forward to seeing how this field develops, and hopefully contributing towards it in some small way. In the meantime, I'd better skype one of my French friends and hit the German books again, this could do me some serious good in the long run...

And in the news today...
--UK helicopters have entered Libyan airspace for the first time in the continuing conflict there
--A Chinese teenager sells his kidney on the black market...and uses the money to buy an iPad
--England reach over 400 against Sri Lanka in the 2nd test at Lord's