Madam Librarian...

Okay, you can't make fun of librarians.

You just can't. Honestly, you may think that all you need is enough hand-eye coordination to type your own name and put books back on the shelf, but it's so much more than that.

You see, I want to be a novelist. Now, while I may want to be a novelist for a career, I have to be realistic and admit that it's probably going to take a very long time for me to be able to make a living writing full-time, so I have to find a job that I love that will pay the bills while I'm cranking out the next Hugo winner on my laptop.

Mum suggested Libary and Information Sciences. My first thought was Cool! I get to work around books, and type on computers and put books back on the shelf! What a simple, easy job.

Nooooo. No no no no.

Today I went to the main office of my University's School of Library and Information Sciences. It's a tiny school, as schools go. Here's where, after a long conversation with the woman at the SLIS office, I got a giant kick in the expectations department.

Despite their tinyness (it's only one floor on the libary), it is the only school of its kind in the province. They get 200 applicants a year, and can only accept 45 students. That means, according to the helpful woman (I should have asked for her name, but I forgot and I didn't), that I need a killer GPA of at the very least, 3.3. My GPA is currently 3.2, which is fairly decent, but not enough to get into SLIS even on a slim year. Sometimes, they even get 4.0s and 3.8s. This means, ladies and gentlemen, that even if I manage a 3.3 by fourth year, if some 4.0 applies at the 11th hour, I could get bumped off.

I'm only in my second year, though, and the SLIS only looks at the GPA of my final two years, so I still have a few months to get my act together.

Still, I have quite an act to get together. I'm extremely, extremely lazy. The reason I have a GPA of 3.2 is because I'm pretty much brilliant. Just imagine if I applied myself! But applying myself means giving up reading my fantasy novels and writing my fantasy stories and watching my movies and television....*sigh*.... I don't know why, but I've always felt like I have to work very hard just to work very hard. I never feel like I'm challenging myself, I always feel like I'm doing just enough to pass, so that I can go back to reading and writing and watching television. And I never know how to do more than enough to pass - I have a remarkable lack of imagination in that particular area.

Still, I could always try - I have three papers coming up at the end of the month, and if I ace them I can raise my GPA, and my stellar marks in Japanese should keep my grade point average afloat. The thing is, I'm pretty bad at reading people, socially. This means I can be wretched at reading my professors and finding out what they expect from me in an essay. In my two years here, I've never gotten an A on an essay. Never. Not even an A-. Always a B+ at the very most. I'm supposed to be a writer, why can't I write a good essay? It has nothing to do with style, it's all the tiny details - I don't focus enough, or I'm focusing too narrowly, but "I always have good ideas". Argh.

Back to SLIS - the woman also warned me that it is a huge workload - they jam all the information and courses they possibly can down their students' throats in a two-year period.

Now, why would I want to enter a school that needs a inhuman GPA and hands out a monstrous courseload? Oh, yeah, they have a 90% employment rate for their graduates.