The First Step
When I first walked into Harold Washington Library Center’s (HWLC) YOUmedia teen space, I had no idea it was the start of a decade-long and counting relationship with the Library. I was a rising high school freshman, and though I didn’t know it yet, that first summer I spent at YOUmedia messing around in the recording studio, workshopping my writing, and drawing on post office stickers with paint markers would change the trajectory of my future.
After I first visited the space, I was hooked. There, I could grow and explore, learn and experiment, and, ultimately, make myself possible. In that first floor room at HWLC, I grew into myself and molded the person I would become. I flirted with the possibility of working as a seamstress and made designs with the help of a media specialist. I tried my hand at photography and checked out a YOUmedia DSLR camera when we took a field trip to Ping Tom Park in Chinatown. Importantly, I performed original songs at the weekly open mic and shared my writing with peers and staff — two things that dramatically built my confidence as a teen creator struggling with low self-esteem.
But it wasn’t all self-directed. During that time, a librarian invited me to join a youth-led team that used video and audio to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza. They drew me in, included me, and made me feel a part of a community of bright and engaged teens.
My initial connection with the Library—and the brilliant people who worked there— sparked a journey that has shaped my academic and professional path. That spark led me to completing a college capstone project on this vital American institution, speaking on a panel at the Library Foundation’s “Powering Possibility” event, working at HWLC in Teen Services this summer, and now, preparing my own graduate school applications for library science programs.
“This is the incredible strength of Chicago Public Library and libraries in general: their power to draw youth in, bring them into the fold, and once there, hold and nurture them.”
A Reconnection
After moving away from Chicago to attend Cornell University, my focus briefly shifted away from YOUmedia and the Library. But in the fall of 2024, while taking a class on public history, I had the opportunity to reconnect with that institution of learning, memory, history, and the future.
At once, recollections of the Library returned to me. It was the perfect idea: I would create a multimedia document that was both research and personal history, bolstered by nonfiction studies of American libraries and interviews I conducted with Chicago Public Library staff I knew while I was a YOUmedia teen.
The experience was extremely special and rewarding. I reconnected with librarians with whom I had lost contact over a period of years, but who were so influential in my becoming and who now got to see me as a near-college graduate. Some of them still worked at Chicago Public Library in the same or different roles, while others had moved out of state. All were eager to lend their perspective to my project and were overjoyed to hear from me.
Even then, eight years after I had first stepped into YOUmedia, the folks I met there and memories of the space itself reverberated powerfully throughout my current life. This is what the library is poised to do: house youth, inspire them, see them along their paths.
Back in Chicago
I had one summer left before completing undergrad in December 2025, and I wanted to spend it in Chicago. I reached out to the librarians with whom I had recently reconnected to inquire about summer jobs in my field, and they surprised me with two incredible opportunities.
First, they invited me to speak on a panel at the Foundation’s Powering Possibility event earlier this month. There, I shared with a crowd of Library supporters, advocates, and champions the way that YOUmedia and the Library changed and shaped my life.
Second, they recommended me for a summer position, which I now hold, as a program assistant helping to administer the After School Matters internship program at every Library branch across the city. I work on the 5th floor of HWLC in Teen Services, alongside some of the very same librarians that inspired and challenged and boosted me when I was a teen. And now, I have the privilege of helping create that same experience for almost 200 teen interns at the Library this summer.
It has been a full circle moment, a testament not only to the selfless public servants who brought me into the fold and continued to think about and uplift me — even long after I had aged out of YOUmedia — but also to the institution of the Library itself. What a novel and warm idea, that there is a place one can visit as a 13-year-old and, across the span of nine years, can continue to return for more enrichment, more opportunity, more abundance.
My relationship with Chicago Public Library has touched me so deeply that I have decided, happily and with conviction, to apply to master of library and information science programs this fall, with the goal of becoming a teen services librarian at a public library. I can’t think of a more special way to spend a career than fostering teens’ nascent ideas, interests, personalities, and talents in the way that treasured librarians at Chicago Public Library did for me.
