So Favorite Daughter Thinks She Wants to Be an Academic Librarian

“I am going to be a college professor. . .Money is not important to me.”
“Oh my god, who let you into this school?”

Hope she’s very patient and a masochist, lol.

I just found this do-it-yourself cartoon site through the Chronicle of Higher Education; apparently I’m among the last few academics in the country to hear about it. It is reported to be very popular as both satire and a teaching tool.

You don’t need much money or any editing skills. And you can publish the finished product, anonymously or not, to YouTube, Facebook, and Xtranormal’s own site. . . .”We’ve become the tool that every niche group can make videos with.”

Nearly every higher-education niche has done just that, it seems, though the gags often make sense only to insiders. For example, do you find regression-discontinuity designs funny? Political scientists do.

You probably don’t need to actually watch the four-minute academic library version above, to imagine the possibilities:

College libraries are like the “prissy” older siblings of their public peers, quips Ms. McDermott, 27, a reference clerk at the Pratt Institute’s library, in New York. She scripted a fake job interview for her affectionate send-up, “So You Want to Be an [Academic] Librarian.”

“I don’t want to work in a public library,” the job candidate declares to her interviewer. “I hate children and poor people. I am very sensitive to foul odors. I want to wear argyle sweaters and loafers to work.”

What follows is four minutes of riffing on the minutiae of library life:

. . .[Ms.McDermott and another featured cartoonist] stress that their real-life professional experiences have been positive, exceptionally so, despite the bile of their videos.

Favorite Daughter also thinks she wants to go on from her master’s degree in library and information sciences someday, after a few years of experience in that academic library. She thinks she wants to earn a PH.D. in the humanities, probably religious cultural studies or maybe English.

So You Want to Get A PhD in the Humanities — That’s the one where a jaded professor warns a bright undergraduate that she will waste away in a library for up to nine years of grad school, only to get a job earning less than a janitor at a college in Alaska, where she will remain single forever and work 65 hours a week “trying to publish an obscure article that no one cares about in an obscure scholarly journal that nobody will read.”

“I like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society,” the pigtailed idealist shoots back. “I want to live a life of the mind.”

“Oh my God,” the professor says. “Life is not a movie script.”