Overnight College Historian: Historical Whiplash and the Flexibility of New Archivists

Abstract

No one said it was easy to start a job, and the archival field makes sure of that. In 2020, I started my first full-time permanent position. That first year, the constant anxiety of a pandemic, and the pressure to learn as much as I could about the history of the institution I represented, compounded into complicated feelings of being exposed as an intellectual fraud. The “imposter” phenomenon was worsened when one considers the scarcity of permanent, full-time entry-level work in the archival field.