November, apart from being a month for writing novels, is also work experience month. The applications land on Boss Lady’s desk and she chooses which students are granted the pure joy of being a library assistant for a week.

The students in this case are aged 16 and are on their Transition Year. This is an optional year they take between junior cycle studies and the heavy duty senior cycle studies that qualify them to go out to work or on to further studies for university degrees etc. It’s like a pause in academic life to help them experience a wider world and decide what they’d like to do with their lives. Of course, at 16, they mostly don’t have a clue what they want to be, and hence they end up picking the library for their work experience module because they think it’s a n...

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