So, why am I taking part in the course? Well, being a member of the organising team, I suppose I couldn’t keep my place behind the scenes, and just watch all you people having fun with our programme. Besides, to overcome a sense of being stuck that was starting to haunt me, I have been thinking a lot about my career in the past few months, so this seems to be the perfect chance to gather my thoughts together and transform them in some form of action.
How do I feel about being a blogger...to be honest, when I read Katie’s sentence about feeling a bit awkward, I thought “that’s me!”. So, being in a group of almost 400 bloggers really feels reassuring – thank you guys for being out there!
However, I must also say that I have gathered some thoughts on how blogging has been beneficial to me so far, and here they come for your pleasure:
- I have a place to record the activities I am undertaking. Like Katie says, writing helps reflecting on experiences, and building a virtual folder will come useful in job applications. How many times did you think “I did that too, I should have mentioned it, shame I forgot!”? It happened to me quite a few times, expecially when firing off job applications in a hurry, or writing the tenth job app with always the same old stuff in it.
- I have found out that, although I am not a native English speaker, I can actually write in English and people seem to like my style. Huge, much-needed confidence boost!
- It proved that my years in journalisms were useful after all. Admitting this has made a big chunk of my family quite happy (along the lines of “I told you so! Why did you leave it for libraries?” Aehm...because I deeply, truly, madly love libraries! Journalism wasn’t such a love story for me).
- It helped me make a case for my name. I have put a link to this post underneath my signature and you won’t believe it if I tell you how many people are using my right name after reading it. The power of social media!
Happy CPD23 everyone!
Hi Maria Giovanna, just wanted to say how much I have enjoyed your blog so far. I'm also amazed that you are doing two lots of cpd at once - I'm already behind just on one! It has definitely been great to meet more careers info people online (and librarians generally) and to read what you're all writing... Hoping my blog might help me to keep on top of at least some of them a bit better. As you know from my LinkedIn messages, replying quickly is not my strong point :) Also, I appreciated the post about your name - I think everyone has the right to choose what they are called. I have a friend called Sara who is constantly being called Sarah or various other things. People actually get annoyed with her if she corrects them! I much prefer it when people tell me what they are called and how to say it, so I know I'm getting it right. Megan
ReplyDeleteHi Megan, belated reply to say thank you for your lovely comment! And all my sympathy to your friend Sara for the "battle of names"...I feel I' ve now found a way to fight for my name, but it's taken more than five years, and the most difficult thing was to find the confidence to actually tell people what my real name is, which is funny because there's nothing wrong in doing so. :-)
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