When I first made a Career Education appointment in the fall of 2016, I was more focused on what I was going to do with the summer of 2017 than anything farther down the road. Sheryl Rosenberg listened to my incoherent and unfocused babbling about my career ideas, asked questions that got me thinking about my future on a larger scale, and highlighted resources I could use to figure out what I was interested in. She also asked about my life and interests beyond what I thought of as strictly career education, and this line of questioning gradually nudged me towards thinking of a much broader swathe of my life at Wellesley as career exploration. I started to remember things about my life and work experience. I had enjoyed learning the ropes of the dishroom at Bates dining hall with its fast pace and routine, and I had derived endless satisfaction from deciphering the signatures of illustrators during a museum internship in 2016. Since I was a child I have liked books, writing, organizing things, making schedules and plans, and telling people facts. I find a wide variety of topics interesting, and I like connecting people to resources as mundane as a graphic explaining how different coffee drinks are made or as important as a reading for class that a professor had assigned but hadn’t been able to post. When I got to read the letters of a WWI soldier and put them in chronological order while volunteering at my local historical society I was excited, and I even enjoyed looking through a list of holdings to see which ones might be relevant to an upcoming exhibit about the turn of the century in my county. I applied for the 2017 Collections internship at the Davis Museum without a very clear idea of what it would involve or what the museum registrar, my supervisor, actually did. The project I worked on for ten weeks this summer turned out to be the cataloging of new acquisitions. The museum had a different amount of information about each object, and I researched them to fill in the gaps and check the accuracy of the information I already had. I found the process of discovering information and making it accessible to other people, as well as making the objects more searchable in the museum database, very rewarding. I got to decipher signatures, explore online databases, and improve my research skills. During the first few weeks of the internship, my career interests changed with lightning speed: I wanted to be a paintings conservator, a registrar, a curator, a textile conservator, a museum educator, a museum administrator. When Brooke Henderson, the Wellesley Art Librarian, gave a short research training to the Davis interns, career lightbulbs really started to turn on for me. After conversations with Davis staff members, friends, and family, I dove headlong into exploring what paths I could take to becoming a research librarian. I interviewed Brooke Henderson and a librarian at Cornell about their careers, and they both gave me invaluable information and advice about the field. I also shadowed a librarian at Hampshire College, someone I’ve known for ten years and felt comfortable reaching out to. I did some online research, mostly about graduate school options but also on job boards to see what employers were looking for. I’m still in the process of exploring the world of librarianship, which is much wider than I had originally thought. The more I learn about the field, the more it seems like work in libraries would be compatible with my interests in languages, literature, teaching, information, collections, accessibility, and social justice. My internship at the Davis was instrumental in my career exploration not because it revealed the one true path I want to take, but because it opened my eyes to the diversity of career paths that are out there, and gave me the tools to understand myself and my interests better. In the past year I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, talking, and journaling about my career, values, and interests. Without putting in this time to reflect, on top of noticing what I enjoyed about different aspects of my internship, I would not have gotten half as far. The courage to see if different doors would open for me, to reach out to people and ask for their time and wisdom, was sometimes hard to come by, but my curiosity pushed me to do things that were slightly uncomfortable, and the results were worth it. This is the just the beginning of my career exploration process, and I’m excited to see what comes next. I’ll keep reaching out to people and asking them for information, and I’ll keep paying attention to the kinds of tasks I enjoy doing. Even if I don’t become a research librarian, I will still have learned a lot about myself from this chapter of my career exploration story. Right now, I’m considering pursuing a Ph. D. in a subject area I’m interested in and a masters in library science. I might also attend rare books school or get a masters degree in education or art history. I’m not sure what I’d like to specialize in as a librarian, or how my enduring interest in becoming a grade school Latin teacher fits into this picture, but I’m confident that I’ll figure it out.