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Epilogue
Greetings, for the final time, fearless readers!
This is going to be my very last blog entry here and I wanted to update you on my post-graduate life as well as provide some course recommendations for those who might be interested. Let's talk about courses first...
So, what should you take if you're going to be an MSI student? Well, that's a tough call, dear grasshopper. You see, no matter what advice anyone may give you, in the end the decision must be yours and yours alone. Your faculty advisor may recommend something, your peers may recommend something else, you may read about something else and recommend it to yourself. So, my disclaimer to you is this: take everything with a grain of salt, including and especially my own list which follows here. Your path is singular and your courses should reflect this--you should take courses that will help you achieve whatever goal it is you want in the end. As a tailored student, I had a lot of freedom in my course selection and I also had a unique goal. I knew early on that my course selections would cross the specializations many times over--my curriculum did not fit into a neat little box with a pretty ribbon tied around it. I tried a lot of different things and I tried to choose as carefully as possible. But mistakes happen and that isn't something you should be afraid of making. Yeah, it kind of sucks because then it's like you've wasted a chunk of 3 credits if you have a course that you don't like so much or didn't give you the total experience you were looking for. However, mistakes also teach you a lot about yourself--what you're capable of, what you're not capable of, things you need to work on, things you're willing to deal with, and things you're not willing to compromise on. Every course you take will have its pros and cons--it depends on what you do with both the pros and the cons that determines your success in the course and as a student.
Things I recommend as grad student "best practices" are the following:
1. Take charge of your own curriculum, no matter your specialization. If you have a prescribed list of courses to take for a particular area, you still need to treat yourself like you are tailored. Be in charge, write a personal goal statement and keep updating it. If you are tailored, you have to do this anyway, but I think it's extremely valuable for non-tailored folks as well. Feeling "lost"? Like you don't know what you want? Write about yourself--I'm not kidding. Hop to it, grasshopper...
2. Be very active during the first 3 weeks of each semester--don't be afraid to use the drop/add period. If a class doesn't seem to be hitting a lot of right notes, look at all of your options and see what you have available to you. Sit in on a different option or talk to the professor. Make sure you get what you need. If there's nothing you can do about it, see #5.
3. Embrace the professional program atmosphere. Don't forget that the MSI program is not a traditional academic program where all you do is read books and write papers for a couple of years. You are expected to get out there, do practical projects, and engage yourself with the world. Choose courses that will allow you to do lots of projects so that you can explore different issues and have a deliverable at the end to show for it.
4. Speaking of projects, if you find a great opportunity that doesn't pay or doesn't pay very much, still consider it like any other opportunity. You're in grad school, we were all poor together. :o) Embrace it. Love it. Learn through it. Seriously. Your professional life will thank you for it if you come away with a great experience.
5. When it sucks and there is nothing you can do about your external circumstances, then it means it is time to shift your internal stance. What are you going to learn about this situation? What can you take away from it? Don't be cynical or sarcastic, be practical. You can learn a whole heck of a lot about yourself through classes that don't turn out to be what you were hoping for, or the dreaded internship from hell, or the job that you need but you really don't enjoy doing. What do these experiences teach you about yourself?
Anecdote #1:
This last point reminds me of many experiences I had that were not the way I had envisioned them. The biggest one was my summer internship. I couldn't afford to go anywhere and so I stayed "local" in the metro-Detroit area. I discovered that while the work I do must be stimulating, I also learned that I need to feel that I have the freedom to make a difference in the place that I work. I learned that management style is extremely important to my professional happiness and well-being. A micro-manager and a territorial atmosphere do not mesh well with my personal tastes. I also learned that I do not enjoy having my personal energy and time wasted--when I show up to do a job, I want to DO the job. I don't want to fetch coffee or do menial tasks. I have a graduate degree, thank you very much--I feel that that entitles me to a certain degree of responsibility. And I want this responsibility--I work very hard to maintain it. So, after a not-so-stellar experience, I ended up in a similar situation for a smaller internship not too long afterwards. But I knew the tell-tale signs. So I stuck up for myself and asked for a reassignment--I got the reassignment and had a great experience after that. I learned more in the short amount of time left than I did in the entire summer and half semester experiences combined. But because I stuck to my work-ethic, I had 2 big deliverables to show for all of it in the end--from both good and bad experiences.
Anecdote #2:
I took a class in a different department during my final semester (a Rackham requirement). I thought it would give me a lot of good external perspective. However, by the time drop/add was over, I realized that this class was not serving my needs well. The syllabus was ill-defined and the direction of the course was so esoteric and academic that it didn't leave any opportunity for me to gain some practical knowledge that I was seeking. I didn't stay active enough during the first 3 weeks of the semester, so I missed out on the drop/add period and I really regretted that. After the fact, it gave me a lot of perspective on the different sides of the "coin" that help me understand where different attitudes come from in my professional arena.
Anecdote #3:
I had a couple of classes that were definitely duds during lecture time. I either felt like I was back in undergrad or high school or something. I just didn't feel challenged enough. But the saving grace was that I could do whatever project I wanted. Knowing that I wanted to work with digital assets in the entertainment field, I jumped at the chance to explore a few different areas and build up projects to showcase in my portfolio. Those projects helped me get my current job. And you know what? The tedious nature of lecture time, actually helped me get the basic information that I needed to do those projects. Sometimes we just can't get everything in the style of an attention-grabbing Hollywood movie. Sometimes the tedious steps in different aspects of the field are what you need--like taking the bitter pill. Yucky, but good for you. To quote Mary Poppins, "A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down." (And you can get the sing-a-long version on YouTube if you so desire. :o)
Ok, finally! Courses...
Now, as I have mentioned earlier and many times before in my blog, I was a tailored student. That means that I got to make my own curriculum to suit my own needs. I took a pretty good cross-section of courses during my time at SI and my reasoning was very goal oriented. Generally speaking, about 50% of my curriculum involved a mix of LIS and ARM courses--in my world, I considered these to be more "traditional" and they provided me the the secure nuts and bolts of the library and archive fields. The other 50% of my curriculum involved a lot of HCI--the reasons for this included that I knew I needed to really boost my technical skills in order to become marketable in what it is I do now. I also spent a lot of time brainstorming and devising good projects which combined both halves, regardless of the course I was taking, so that I could maximize the learning opportunities while building my portfolio to showcase all of the things that I could do. The following list are courses I took while I was working on my MSI degree and the reasons why I think they were useful:
501 - The client project. I think this course is still labeled as "501" in the new foundations that start up this fall. Anyhoos, you'll know it when you see it. It's a great class to help you get your feet wet in constructive group collaboration, client relations, and seeing real data flow in a real situation. Because let's be honest... you get so busy after a while, you aren't really reading everything. Seeing the real deal helps you learn it better and faster than if you were simply asked to read it. I did all of the visual data mapping for my group (I was deemed better suited for this because I had an art degree and I like to make everything into a picture :o) -- I used these skills for my summer internship and I am currently using them in my new job post-graduation.
502 Choice and Learning - I don't think this foundation course exists anymore. I think it has been broken up into different courses. But this was actually one of my favorite classes--it had a combination of psychology and economics, using things like game theory to show how we all make decisions and how decision-making impacts information and information use. This class actually helped me to understand conflicts better, so when I had my difficult summer internship, I was able to see the tug-of-war between all of the different units from a very different perspective. Challenging, fascinating, and totally unexpected!
519 Intellectual Property Law - A big shout out to Jack Bernard who is probably the most enthusiastic instructor I've ever had. Here's a guy who loves to be in the classroom and the material is super interesting too. You'll learn about intellectual property everything during the course of your foundations--it's inescapable. But beyond that, it's extremely important! This class is like a delicious sampler of all the different aspects of information use and the laws that shape how we do things today. You also get to do a project for this class--I explored my interest in entertainment some more by looking at cases and how they apply to open source content.
539 Design of Complex Websites - Before I tell you more about this course, you should note that this is an HCI course through and through. It's become very popular with LIS and ARM folks in the recent past, but make no mistake--you will log A LOT of hours with your computer in any course that involves programming. Don't say I didn't warn you... When I took this course, we did some basic HTML and CSS and then moved on to the meat of the course which consisted of Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails builds these beautiful database-backed websites and it's still relatively new compared to other languages like PHP, SQL, etc. If you get it and you can talk about it and you wind up working with other programmers, then you'll be very interesting during an interview. :o) I took this class to gain more understanding of programming and database construction--it was useful, but painful only because my PC laptop died on me when I was working on my final project. I have since bought a MacBook and I love it and I'll never go back (her name is Lola :o).
543 Programming 1, Java - See disclaimer/warning for 539. :o) I took this class before I took 539 and it was the very first time I ever programmed anything in my entire life. It was brutal. It was hard. It was extremely valuable to me. I get the process of programming, but I won't hold back and I'll be the first to tell you that I am NOT a gifted programmer. That much I learned about myself! What this class taught me was how to talk to programmers and I do this every day at work now, so it's been very helpful. This was the class that actually broke my PC and then it was basically broken when I took 539 which officially caused it to die. If you're going to program, I highly recommend using a Mac. And that is my very unofficial endorsement. ;o) It can be done on a PC, but if I did it over again I would have bought a Mac instead.
580 Understanding Records and Archives - I call this one Archives 101. A prereq. for future ARM courses and very helpful so that you can understand what archives are, the current leaders in the field, and the current issues in the field. This course gave me the proper vocabulary and knowledge. If you are going to do ARM, you need to take this. If you aren't sure yet but you can take it, then take the course--because if you decide to take another ARM course later, you'll need this one.
615 Special Topics: Digital Libraries - I feel like I really grew as a grad student in this class. Many thanks to Dan Atkins for letting me run around with my own ideas. In this class, I developed a research hypothesis in which I wanted to examine the impact of open source content on the entertainment industry. I proposed that if more production companies share more content, that they'll increase their profits. It was super cool, because I got to use the Snakes on a Plane movie as my model. Talk about a non-boring project! Getting to watch fake movie trailers and research the different fan-based content felt more like play than homework. This really helped to shape my current outlook on possible solutions to the digital age in old-school Hollywood.
622 Evaluation of Systems and Services - You MUST take this course! It is an HCI course, but not programming. It's a group project in which you do work for a client, rather akin to 501. But soooo much more involved! This class is so invaluable to me right now because I am actually doing a full evaluation in my current job. I would not be prepared to do this if I hadn't taken this course. My group did our evaluation for MBooks and our reports were published online. You can see them here: http://www.lib.umich.edu/usability/projects/MBooks.html. I'm really proud to have been a member of my evaluation team--we did an awesome job and I learned so many great things. If you plan on doing anything technical, this class should be on your list. If you don't plan on doing anything technical, you might want to consider this because it will give you a skill set that other candidates in your field do not have. You can save an organization a lot of money if you can help them understand what is going on with the present situation--knowing where you are at saves you money so that you don't buy some new system or piece of software that doesn't actually service your needs.
666 Organization of Information Resources - also known as Cataloguing, also known (affectionately) by another name due to the course number. (You're a smart grasshopper, figure it out ;o). I won't mince words here--cataloguing is dry. Dry like the desert on a summer day. It is not for the feint of heart! Only true grasshopper warriors are cut out for the world of authority subject headings and classification standards. It is so essential to the world of information, though, that I cannot imagine NOT taking this course. I was introduced to the different organization schemes and I got to do the project that really sealed the deal with my current job. I took the AACR2 and FRBR, combined the best of both worlds, and applied them to digital animated graphics. And I made a prototype web page for my faux catalogue. When I was flown out for interviews at my current job, I brought Lola with me (who is Lola? See 539 description) and on her I had placed my entire portfolio. The capstone of my portfolio was this sample catalogue, which I had also presented at the ExpoSItion in a poster presentation (see: http://www.si.umich.edu/stulife/student-projects.htm). When each of my 10 interviewers asked me about my vision for their situation, I used my project to explain my ideas. I work here now. Need I explain more? Big thanks to Bonnie Dede for letting me run my own show. :o)
681/summer internship - Yes, you heard my anecdotal story about my internship. But I put it in my valuable courses because... well, it was valuable. I learned about myself and I guess it was the most important thing I needed to learn that summer. I needed to know what kind of management style helped me to thrive. You see, I am a Pollyanna. You know, the glass is always half full. I will say something is "just great!" when it's really not so great. Because I'll find something for it to be great about. This situation was definitely not great. But I toughed it out and learned a really hard and really important lesson that has made me very happy post-graduation. When I shopped for jobs, I shopped for management style just as much as I shopped for the type of work that I would be doing. The summer internship is a great "check up" point midway through your MSI degree--it helped me to re-evaluate what I was going after during my second and final year in the program. (Do be aware, however, that other people had AMAZING internships and you probably will too. Just don't be afraid if you end up in a situation like mine. It happens.)
647 Information Resources and Services - Here's my disclaimer (personally speaking) on this class. If you're going to take it, take it in your first year. I took this class in my second year and found it to be bordering on too basic, just a little too much hand holding for my own personal tastes. Most of the people to take this course are first year students too, so it makes sense for it to be that way. The good thing about this course is learning about different ways to locate information. Being a reference professional can be REALLY difficult! Talk about amazing detectives. Google does not have all the answers (in fact, I have been liking a new search engine lately: http://www.mahalo.com -- try it, you'll like it :o). If you want to become a better researcher, you should take this class. I wish I had taken it my first year because it probably would have helped me with some of my papers!
692 Archive practicum - This course was so helpful. It involved a seminar style class instruction where professionals from the field came in to talk about current issues in the field. It was like being handed information directly from the brains of important people. :o) The other half of the class involved an internship. Again, I got to do some cool stuff here--I took the concept of a "time line" and we visited the land known as "forevermore never boring" and the online exhibit became an information visualization map to show connections between the different collections. Really cool!
And courses I wish I had taken...
Alas, there will always be courses that you wish you had taken and didn't have time for. And you will inevitably choose a course that might have been better off if you had traded it for another. C'est la vie! The best thing I can do is pass on to you what I wish I had taken and the reasons why. If someone else is similar to me, then maybe it will help with the decision-making process.
540 Networked Computing - This is now the new 502 foundation course. It came recommended to me at orientation, but I didn't really understand why. I think a lot of people had the same confusion because a lot of people come into SI without any significant technical background. Take a "techie" course can be intimidating. However, this course teaches foundations that are really essential to doing one's job really well. You can pick up concepts from this over time, but it would have saved me a lot of confusion and catching up if I had taken it during my first semester.
655 Management of Electronic Records - Yes, this is very relevant to what I do now, ironically enough. Thankfully my archive practicum seminar made up for a lot of this. But I still wish that I had taken the course because it is just good to have under one's belt if you're interested in managing digital assets. When I came into the MSI program, I didn't know what was involved with electronic records management (ERM)--I thought it was something really boring and stodgy. Yet, my job now is essentially ERM and it is so far from boring! ERM positions are great too, because they often pay very well and involve very cutting edge issues. I encourage you to explore this area because I think you'll find it really fascinating and in high demand.
658 Information Architecture - This is a really valuable course as well for understanding how things should be structured on the back end. I spend a lot of time reading IA books right now to get myself caught up a bit more. Big fan of Peter Morville's books! :o) I think this course would have been very interesting to take, given what I do now in my current job. But sometimes you just don't know what is going to happen. I'm a lifelong student. :o)
A different external cognate - If I could do it over again, I think I would actually take a course that wasn't so directly related to the film community (which is what I tried to do). I think I would do something that involved allowing me to think more creatively, develop some different problem solving methods, etc. I generally pride myself in being able to do these things already, but I think the subject matter ended up being less important compared to the course content.
So, that's about it for courses. Whew! I forgot how tiring it is to write a full blog entry... :o) I've been at my position as the Digital Asset Specialist (aka Digital Archivist) at Disney Online in the Walt Disney Internet Group for almost 2 months now. I have been getting acclimated to my new company, getting the "lay of the land" so that I can see how the digital assets flow around here, and getting my evaluation organized and running. I spend a lot of time networking both in-house and externally--I get to talk with some really cool people out there! I love making new connections and seeing my Rolodex expand (virtually speaking, of course :o). I feel very at home here, which is great, like I've been here longer than it feels. All of the courses I mentioned above have come in handy and I even use my 622 books. :o) The team I work with is great and the director of my department is an amazing manager. I really appreciate the freedom that I am given to manage my own schedule, conduct business as I need to, etc. I have to remind myself frequently that I need to give myself time to simply acclimate to my new life and environment--I am always prone to jumping into the deep end and just going for it. It is weird to only work one job, instead of 3 jobs plus 12 credits. My employer is very generous and I have lots of electronic "toys" to keep me wired 24/7, so I do take work home with me, but I am very strict about maintaining personal time. Even though I have a Blackberry, it doesn't go everywhere with me all of the time. During business hours or while traveling? Yes. Otherwise, no. I spend my time outside of work exploring the Los Angeles area (which has a ton of stuff to do), enjoying this incredibly abundant sunshine that I never had back in Michigan, and doing a LOT of salsa dancing. :o) I'm having a ball--I work hard and I play hard, but that's exactly what I wanted. I love big cities and I really like west coast culture. The people I work with work really hard, but everyone is very casual and relaxed, despite the pressures that come with a fast-paced environment. I can wear casual clothes to work (including flip-flops and jeans), but I always choose to dress up when I have meetings. I enjoy working for Disney--what I do is definitely work, but it's fun because the content is fun. I am proud that my company's website is http://www.disney.com. I LOVE seeing the new movies come out and know that I am part of what makes that magic happen. I get some pretty cool perks like discounts with my employee ID and getting to see free screenings of the movies when they come out. I took a friend with me to see Ratatouille and we had a great time--and it was such a fantastic movie! People are always telling me about their favorite Disney characters and movies, or their favorite ABC television shows, or how they can be sure that the content is family-friendly. I like that my company produces a high quality product and I'm still pinching myself because I get to be a part of all of that.
Other than that, I am finally moved into my apartment with things hanging on the walls and everything. I even got a basil plant and some other herbs that are growing on my balcony at home, so I do a lot of cooking. Moving across the country was a big move! Not so easy to do either. Most things are wrapped up and over with back in Michigan, except for my old apartment complex which is giving me some troubles with my old lease. If you are moving in to the area with a new lease, be sure to read the whole thing and know it well! My old complex is horribly confused because they took over my apartment from a different company and my lease is different from their traditional lease. It's a headache and a half. Hopefully it will be cleared up soon. It's definitely nice to have things like health insurance again and to have a healthy salary to live off of. It allows me to be able to do things that are important to me which makes me a much happier camper at work and therefore much more productive. I've made some good friends out here--one person I met at corporate orientation and she and I work in different parts of the company but we hang out after work and get together for lunch a lot. The salseros here are amazing dancers and I've made some good friends here too, just like I did back in metro-Detroit. One of my salseros lives locally and so he and I spend a lot of time together--I'm watching him get his new salsa dance studio up and running which is really exciting. Also exciting because I get to use it anytime I want! :o) I am also planning my upcoming birthday (next week) which will include a Harry Potter movie night, dim sum in Chinatown, and about 4 or 5 nights of dancing. It's a marathon! :o) It should be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to it. I have some travels coming up soon for work and sometime in between or after they're completed, I will have a little dinner party at my apartment. I was at one friend's house by the beach this past weekend and it was so cool to be able to see the Pacific Ocean. I am absolutely in love with the costal areas and all of the palm trees wherever I go. I'm so thankful that everything worked out well for me. I feel like my hard work has really paid off!
Well, I hope that you found my blog entries helpful during the time that I have been writing them. I have certainly enjoyed writing and now I shall officially hang up my "pen" and call it a day. Best of luck to all the future grasshoppers! If you choose the MSI program and you work really hard, you can definitely achieve your goal. SI is a very special place if you can make it your own. If I did it, so can you!
all the best,
maw :o)
Posted by maryaw at July 16, 2007 08:46 PM
