Coming back to work in Northern BC after completing my M.A.S. degree was in many ways a rude awakening. A few short weeks after graduating, I was back in Prince George and working as a lone arranger in a small repository. I went from being inundated with professional events, communicating with academics in my field daily, and having innumerable conversations with fellow archival library and archives students, to being the only information worker in my organization. It was not my first time working in Northern BC, but it felt infinitely lonelier and isolated now that I had experienced the wealth of opportunities for professional engagement and development in Greater Vancouver and Victoria. Worse, it made me realize how little archival education and the profession is geared towards archivists working in small repositories outside of population centres. Although doing a job that I loved, I suddenly felt removed and separate from the larger professional discourse, with an irrevocable disconnect between the education I had received and the realities of working in a small archives.
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