There was a huge lead up in the week before work experience. The majority of my friends were going to work at local primary schools. I had chosen a University library in Cambridge as I have an interest in books and have worked at my school’s library for 4 years; however, I wasn’t sure what to expect, as every library is different and has different systems to get used to.
I woke up at 06:30 every morning to catch the 08:20 train, before walking to arrive at the Faculty about an hour later. I have regular breaks and lunch at midday to 13:00 and leave at about 16:40 to get home at about 18:30-ish.
I slowly got used to the issuing system, which helped immensely and I learnt a lot about what my school’s library didn’t allow its students to do, such as processing and cataloguing books. The people there were friendly, did the usual work in libraries, such as issuing and returning books and had a look at
Bloomberg and Datastream analysis. At the beginning of my second week, I went on a trip with some of the rest of the library staff to the
Magdalene Library, to see how things are run there. This gave me a more rounded view of the world of University libraries and showed me the different approaches different libraries have to the same tasks.
Overall, work experience has been a nice change from usual schoolwork and has shown me what it is like to have a job. It has helped me begin to decide which careers I would like to do in the future and taught me a lot about the workplace.
Imogen (work experience 9 to 20 March 2015)
