A lot has changed for me since the last time I wrote on this blog.

Having spent the last three years living in Spokane for my work, my husband and I decided it was a good time to head back home to be closer to our family and core group of friends. It wasn’t an easy choice; we had a great life in Spokane, and maybe could have settled there for the long-term, in other circumstances. But we missed our people, so as soon as I found a job and my husband graduated from his MPH program, we packed up our apartment and our cat, and moved back home.

The thing about working in libraries is that you can choose where you live or you can choose where you work, but you can’t choose both (or rather, it’s really hard to do both). In this case, I chose where I wanted to live and decided to be more flexible in terms of my work. I ultimately took a position as an information specialist on an evidence synthesis team within a healthcare system.

The transition from a traditional academic librarian role to essentially being a systematic review librarian has been challenging to navigate. Almost everything about this new position is different from the job I left behind. It’s a much more specialized role, with a large team, defined processes, and a narrow scope of work. But different isn’t bad. I’ve been spending a lot of my first month in this new position further educating myself about the methodology and techniques behind systematic reviews, and I’m becoming increasingly convinced that I’m going to love this work. The people I work with are kind and encouraging, and I think I’m going to develop a lot of interesting new skills during my time here.

It took about a month to make this transition, and it wasn’t always easy. More than a few times, a small voice in my head has asked if we just made a huge mistake. But I’m glad that I took this chance to try something new. It’s a great reminder that there is no one right career path, and whatever path you do take doesn’t need to be linear. I’m excited to see what kind of experiences I’m going to have during this new phase in my life!