Joe Cera, CSSIS grant winner, on his first AALL conference

Note: We've asked all our Grant winners to submit a blogpost about their experiences at the AALL Conference in July. This post is from Joe Cera, an Intern/Law Librarianship Student at the University of Washington, Gallagher Law Library.

I was very happy to be awarded a grant by the CS-SIS group to attend the annual conference. I was a little nervous about the whole experience because everyone I talked to had a different opinion of the annual conference and I didn’t know what to expect.

Checking in was surprising. I knew there would be a lot of librarians there, but I didn’t expect the atmosphere. The whole area was buzzing with some kind of nervous energy – like bees without any flowers. I’ll admit that this made me a little nervous, but these are my people so I jumped right in. I also thought it was fun that each person received a canvas bag which made identifying librarians outside of the actual conference very easy (they were everywhere).

I am a recent graduate from the University of Washington Law Librarianship program and the conference offered a great opportunity to meet new colleagues. Unfortunately, I did not get to take full advantage of all the conference activities but I did get to see a lot of the placement office. The interview process at the conference turned out to be very stressful but extremely rewarding. While I didn’t get to meet a lot of librarians in the traditional conference method I was able to meet a large group of librarians in the interview process.

Prior to the conference I was sure that I could participate in a number of interviews, see a handful of programs, and participate in extra events. It wasn’t until I arrived at the conference that I realized how busy I would actually be. The interviews were only about 30 minutes to an hour, but each of those interviews required hours of preparation. I did step in to the exhibition hall to see the new toys. A new, unemployed librarian was not the person vendors wanted to spend a lot of time with but I did get a good feel for some new products.

Overall, I found my experience extremely rewarding. I met many librarians through the interview process. I also found that my limited experience with what I consider to be the actual conference experience was like dipping my toes in to test the water. The water seems nice and I look forward to jumping in next year.