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The home strech is here!

Happy belated New Year! I hope you had a great holiday season. Mine went by much too quickly but it was full of lots of visiting with friends and family which was nice. Now things are back into full swing at school and it's truly amazing how quickly life picks back up again! As promised, I will give you my impressions of how my semester will be shaping up...

If you can believe it, I just (and I mean JUST) submitted my application for April graduation. Holy wow! Never fear, dear grasshopper, I will still be writing my blog until I graduate, so you'll get to read all about how crazy busy my life becomes the closer that graduation approaches. But first, my classes this semester... After a little bit more juggling and pondering I decided to settle on a course selection totalling 9 credits. I have plenty of credits for graduation now, so I didn't need to take 12 credits like I have for each of my previous semesters. At first I thought I would have all of this extra time, but in grand "Maw Fashion" (as my friends love to say) my life has only filled up that much more. Of course! If you've been reading my blog this year then you know that I can't sit still and I must find a way to cram 30 hours into every 24 hour day. :o)

So, this semester I am taking 2 courses at SI: Evaluations of Systems and Services & the Archive Practicum. Evaluations of Systems and Services is a very popular course in the HCI specialization area and it involves a rather involved group project. We will all be finding out soon what groups we are in and then we will do usability evaluations for a client. It's going to be a lot of work (reports due almost every week of the semester) but it's also going to teach me some very valuable skills that I need in order to help potential employers solve their information access issues. The archive practicum is also really cool because each week I spend 7 hours at my internship site doing nothing but hands-on work and then each week we all come together as a group for a seminar style lecture series. I have been placed at state government archival institution and will be doing all sorts of stuff like processing a small photo collection, working on Web exhibits, helping in the research reference room, etc. I had my first day on-site on Friday and they put me to work right away--they are very friendly and really welcome any techie input I can give them which tickles me pink because I can't wait to help make their web access easier for both administrators and users. This will tie in really nicely with the evaluations course--definitely a good combination.

I am also taking my external cognate (a course you take in a different department) in the newly renamed department of Screen Arts & Cultures (formerly Film & Video)--the course is a graduate level film history and theory course. For this course, we have a "lab" session every week and watch movies for about 3 hours and then the next day we have a discussion for 3 hours. It's a seminar style course and very grad school-y. :o) Some of the people in class are doctoral students and the rest of us are masters students--a couple of the other students are like me, taking a cognate course in a different department than their degree. It's a very lively bunch of people and discussions never require the professor to keep the conversation going which is pretty cool--I don't think I have ever had a class with that much energy in it. But the course is very different than my SI courses because it is a classic academic graduate course. We have a lot of reading, we are required to discuss, and there are papers, presentations, and research projects. I'm so used to DOING stuff in my SI courses, so this is sort of weird to me that we pretty much only discuss what we've read or watched on the screen. Even in other seminars (like the digital libraries seminar I took last winter) we still had a very long and involved paper, project, and lecture.

As you can see, my 9 credits this semester is really a lot more than just 9 credit hours. One class has double hours and another requires 7 hours per week on site in addition to class time. But I soldier on! Never a dull moment in my lilfe... :o) In addition to all of the studies that I do, job hunting has also become a new "course" for me. I have been revising my resumes (yet again) and getting them ready for a variety of upcoming deliveries. I will be attending the American Libraries Association midwinter conference in Seattle at the end of the week. I'm really looking forward to this because it's my first professional organization conference--I am planning on attending sessions about youth and media use in libraries, scouring the exhibition hall (my goal is to come home with the new Sasha Cohen READ poster--she's my favorite figure skater :o), and most importantly to interview with various libraries who will be attending and are looking to hire new staff. There will be lots of other people attending from SI which will be really great--it's always nice to know that you have your support network at a big event like this. We're all planning dinner outings and will cheer each other on as we attempt to impress potential employers. Aside from the ALA conference, I am also in the process of contacting a new networking connection at a very cool place (the name of which I will keep under wraps for now until things materialize more). For this, I have been getting lots of 2nd opinion help from Career Services--yes, I do realize that I still work as an assistant for our career advising, but you can never go wrong with a couple of extra opinions. And then there are the regular applications that I'm starting to put together and submit to various places. Over the semester break I sent in applications for non-profit organizations which was really good practice--like a "warm-up."

I'm quite sure things will be developing quickly over this semester so I will try to write as frequently as possible to keep you updated! When I get back from the ALA conference I will be sure to tell you all about it. Until next time...
-maw :o)

Posted by maryaw on January 14, 2007 at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)