Working With a Passion

Grinch @ holiday outreach event for foster families, along with Grinch's son volunteering to help at the event.
Holiday outreach for foster families with my kiddo volunteering

Hello all! I am Mellissa Clark from southern California and currently living in Kingsland, Georgia. I work full time as a Library Manager with Camden County Public Library. I am attending FSU virtually for the MSI program to broaden my career opportunities. I enjoy my job and what we do for, and within the community, like putting on amazing and immersive programs. I often find myself dressing up as various characters for our programs to bring about lifelike characters.

Although being the center of attention is out of my comfort zone I put everything I have into creating a fun and enjoyable event for all the patrons who come through our doors. We are a small library but see anywhere from 40-1,200 people in attendance at each event. My staff and I have so much fun, that various community organizations request us to join their events due to our passion and plethora of wacky character costumes.

This class is going to be a lot of fun while still being challenging. I hope to learn more about photo and video editing to better our marketing strategy for our library. I do not have access to our website to work with, but I do have control of our social media pages and can apply everything I learn from this class to those platforms. I have worked with some video editing software and I highly enjoy it, but I know there is so much more to learn. Although we reach far beyond our town, I know we can further our reach with better videos and pictures for promotions.

Camden County Public Library (GA) 2022 Haunted Library event, Freddy and  ghost bride.
2022 Haunted Library Event

In the little time I have left after a full day of work, classes, and homework; I work with our local high school instructing their guard. It’s not something people typically know about, so here is a short video of what we do in Winter Guard. I absolutely love teaching this group of students and watching them overcome each challenge presented to them. Seeing them grow in confidence and strength is amazing and such a rewarding experience. This last marching season they blew away the judges, the staff, and parents. A dream would be to teach color guard full time. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job hence the time and money I am spending on a degree, but the feeling of teaching something that gave me so much growing up, is like nothing else. We are getting ready for our first competition for winter guard season and I can’t wait to see what this season holds for our team!