I’ve been reading the Future Ready with the Library posts at the YALSA blog and it’s got me thinking about the skills I was building in middle school and how they have persisted and how I’ve leveraged them throughout my career.

In middle school, I spent my out-of-school time practicing theater, reading books, and coding in BASIC. I volunteered one summer at the library. (My memory of this is that somebody at school decided I needed more to occupy me and sent me to the counselor and when she asked my interests, “reading” was the only one she could figure out how to match with a volunteer opportunity.)

In my career, I’ve been an educator and public speaker (both use my theater training), a librarian, and a web editor (HTML is pretty easy if you’ve got a handle on BASIC). I use knowledge and skills from all of these domains as a researcher, too.

It’s fun and cool to think about the connections between that me and this me.