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February 26, 2008
ASB DC, Day Two
Hello from ASB!
Two days down and three to go for my five-day engagement at the Smithsonian Museum of American History! DC is a good twenty degrees warmer than Michigan, so even through it’s February, I still feel like I’m on vacation in some tropical clime, where flipflops and sunscreen are more important than my laptop and notebooks.
There are four of us working on processing the Naff collection, which is good because its HUGE! We spent a good chuck of the first day rehousing photographs, which can be pretty boring work except for the whole part where you get to look through 100 years of family photos from dozens of families you’ve never met. For every cute baby or wedding picture, there was something completely bizarre, like a hula dancer at a church social or snapshots of the aftermath of a Druze rebellion in 1925. Then we moved onto a very broadly defined series of “personal papers” which basically contained every piece of paper donated by these families-poems, newspaper clippings, letters, naturalization papers, you name it. Some are completely in Arabic, so we have to trust that the historian who collected all of these materials correctly and comprehensively labeled them in English (which is not always the case).
Our supervisors have done a wonderful job of working in specific learning opportunities into our practical processing experiences. Each day at lunch a different staff member gives a talk while we eat. Today a music archivist showed us clips and talked about musicians and how their styles can be affected by changing technology and media, from television to digital sampling. Very cool stuff. Also, as we run into preservation needs, such as specialized rehousing, they teach us all how to create these items. Today we made “sink mats” to hold fragile glass negatives. Mine was particularly conservation-tastic, if I do say so myself.
There are so many things to do in the city, it can be tempting to go explore every night. Luckily, the hotel has wifi and I’m tired enough to be perfectly happy doing homework in my hotel room while the city bustles below. Our hotel is right Capitol Hill area (only three blocks from the Mall) and so there’s always something going on below us. I’m a heavy sleeper who likes cities, so I’m pretty much in heaven right now.
I’ll try to write more in a few days, to give you the full view of my Alternative Spring Break experience. Until then, g’night!
-Megan
Posted by messelti at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2008
Alternative Spring Break!
Today I'm going to sing the praises of a great program here at SI, because right now it's all I can think about. Normally February is a blue time for me. It's a time of crappy weather and crappier midterms, of stress and cold, and I don't like it one bit.
This year I signed up for Alternative Spring Break. I remember ASB from my undergrad years as a service opportunity: usually, students would travel somewhere and build houses, feed the homeless, etc. for a week instead of partying in Cabo San Lucas. SI, however, puts a spin on it to make a particularly valuable opportunity for MSI students, particularly those with their eyes open for summer internship opportunities.
ASB through the School of Information is also a service opportunity, but SI targets organizations specific to the field of information science, such as academic and public libraries, community nonprofits, and larger organizations such as ALA and NARA, and sends students there to work on 30-40 hour projects, like a mini-internship. Students gain a week of great experience (and are sometimes offered summer internships) and participating organizations get a week of free labor and the chance to impart a little wisdom to the next generation of information professionals.
And the cost? Just $25. Oh, and you have to pay for your own food and transportation (around the city, not to or from it, which makes walking a good and often feasible way to minimize costs). SI raises funds to cover your housing and transportation to and from the host city. They also find student volunteers to organize carpools and social events, so you'll still get a chance to hang out with good people. (You know what they say about all work and no play...)
So, I am very excited. There were a lot of great projects available at really exciting sites, like the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Federal Trade Commission. I was assigned to my first choice, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, where I'll be working with a small team of SI students and some of the archivists there to process the Naff Arab American Collection, which is a collection of oral histories, photographs, manuscripts, and other articles documenting the experiences of Arab-American immigrants in the early twentieth century. My inner history geek is, well...geeked.
Oh yeah, and right now it's 28 degrees outside. In DC, it's 42 degrees. Should be a good 10-20 more when I'm down there. Heck yeah!
Alright, enough from me. I'll write more when I'm actually down there.
-Megan
Posted by messelti at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
February 04, 2008
A Pretty Sweet Deal
I guess I haven't mentioned this before, but my middle name is Slacker. My parents were prescient like that.
Anyhow, in the quest to fund your MSI you might find that though there are a number of jobs available to bright new SI students, none of them are going to help that much with the price of tuition. Without a scholarship to ease the pain, what is one to do?
Well, of course there are always loans...They're a necessary evil of graduate school (at least for Master's students) but it can't help to look for alternatives, can it?
A little known fact about the University of Michigan and the Graduate Employees Organization (read: union) that teaching or research assistantships are a great way to work and pay for school. They're hard to find (for MSI students, at least) but totally worth it. Depending on how much you work, you can get a full tuition waiver (for each semester you hold the position), health insurance, and a stipend. And yes, that tuition waiver covers out-of-staters, too!
Now, here's the rub. Normally, teaching assistantships go to Master's or Doctoral students in a department for assistance in undergraduate-level classes. And SI only has one of those. However, many other departments hire SI and other students (especially departments with a small graduate student population and very large, popular undergraduate courses). Information on this can be found at http://www.hr.umich.edu/acadhr/grads/postings.html, which gives a list of departments, links to their sites (where job postings and contact information can be found) and information on how often they hire outside of their own department.
As for research assistantships, these positions often go to Doctoral students, but occasionally an interested MSI student will take the leap and contact a faculty member in charge of an interesting project, and end up on the project. So check out active projects on http://www.si.umich.edu/research/default.htm and feel around. It can't hurt to try, right?
Alright, that's it for now. So much to do! Spring break approaches!
-Megan
Posted by messelti at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)