You may have seen a new face on the “Our Team” section of the website and that’s me! I’m Tiana, the intern, but we felt that it would be better to describe me with the term Communications Assistant seeing as that’s what I’ll be doing here. For a little bit of background on me, I did a B.A. in English and Business Management at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and then an MSc. in East Asian Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Basically my academic background boils down to a lot of area studies but of different areas and accidentally becoming a slight Haruki Murakami expert during my master’s (I know too much about him as a writer and have too many theories about how 1Q84 can be interpreted).
I joined Public Libraries 2030 because I like pushing myself out of my comfort zone professionally. In the past, I’ve done the usual student jobs and I’ve done a bit of project management, research, and admin in other internships. Working on communications seemed like a good challenge for me because I spend a lot of time analysing written communication but never really producing my own. So now, I’ve flipped the proverbial coin and have to put into practice everything that I know to make sure that Public Libraries 2030 have good communications. To say that I’m nervous is an understatement but that’s part of life and learning curves are usually steep right?
At the same time, being an intern here is unbelievably enriching. On the one hand, I’m learning so much about libraries and how they go beyond the transactional relationship that I almost instantly think of when I think of a library. Being able to discover the sector and understand it through the work done at Public Libraries 2030 has been one of the best ways to learn. On the other hand, the team here are mines of knowledge and are willing to share it all and discuss it at almost any time. I can only hope to cultivate as much knowledge as they have both generally and about libraries.