Coral Hess

My first class of the spring semester happens today. It is not 12pm-3pm, as I had mistakenly remembered, but 3pm-6pm. (So, in order to leave myself one weekday for doing homework, I think I may move my internship hours from Tuesdays to Mondays.) I have a cold and am considering napping for a couple of hours before I go, because, wow, do I feel cruddy. What a terrible way to start a semester!

For anyone who is planning to go to ALA Annual this year, a reminder: registration opened today. The early bird price is significantly lower than the full price, so sign up now!

Labels: ala, classes, on a personal note, scheduling

This year started out really awfully, to be honest, right down to a nasty stomach flu on New Year's Eve. There was all kinds of badness. I think the extra hole punched in my ear was the high point of my January. Anyway, here's a fairly complete rundown of the failures and successes of the year, with some added commentary at the end.

Tried and failed (in roughly chronological order):

• Getting a graduate assistantship at Pitt - their website lies; there is no such thing for Master's students
• Keeping my wisdom teeth
• Studying for (and eventually taking) the CCNA - I got through maybe half of the book before quitting Booz Allen and thus the study group I'd set up.
• Taking an American Sign Language class - work got in the way, and I had to drop out
• Talking sense into a group of more than five people who were doing something damaging
• Not hurting my knee severely enough that I couldn't use it all summer
• Having a nice beach vacation
• Getting people to come play in my parlor larps
• Making a blanket in time to give it to people for late-Christmas
• Unpacking

Tried and succeeded:

• Getting into library school
• Getting a Pitt Partners placement doing what I [thought I] would want to do after graduating
• Playing with a penguin at the Aviary
• Buying a Mac and an iPod
• Getting a summer job as a library assistant before library school started
• Building a website on my very own domain, for the first time ever (I've Tripoded and my-school-paged it up in the past, which just isn't the same)
• Rescuing four baby ducks from a drain
• Attending first ALA conference and making some library friends
• Getting good grades in my first semester of library school
• Finding an excellent field placement
• Getting a volunteer position at the Aviary
• Getting a scholarship to attend a conference

On the whole, I think it's been a reasonably successful year, despite the poor start.

Looking ahead, I know I am changing careers at a bad time, economically speaking, but I've got high hopes that I'll get a reasonable job before this time next year. (I also have not-entirely-plausible hopes about what that job might be. :)) More immediately, spring semester is going to be rough, but I think I'm ready for it.

I am still working on my resolutions and goals. So far, the only one I've really set is that I am going to stop eating factory farmed meat, except for 1) what's already in my freezer right now and 2) when I'm at someone's house and they've cooked. I'll still eat grass-fed beef and free-range chicken, though obviously less often since they cost more. I'll also eat fish, though I need to find the little card I have that lists "ethical" fish to eat. (Some are really environmentally unsound, right now, it turns out.) This is part of a larger goal of living more sustainably. Also, I think a goal of straight A's through the rest of library school is obvious, even if it's a tad unreasonable, given my schedule.

Since the bulk of my year is taken up with school, and I can't know whether I'll be in Pittsburgh or elsewhere afterwards, goal-making is a little tricky.

Labels: on a personal note

I've started a few posts in my head, but only today did I realize that I didn't, you know, post any of them. It turned out that I didn't have the kind of down-time I expected to have during the break: classes (and projects) ran until the 11th, work kept going right up until the 19th, and I started both my field placement and volunteer position in work's "off" days, in addition to trying (and, it seems, failing) to knit a blanket, making Christmas presents, and just generally preparing for two back-to-back multi-state treks. I didn't actually get more than one Sunday at home, and I think I wasted most of it sleeping, instead of doing all of those cleaning/organizing projects I was hoping to do; so, I'm going into next semester with a still-messy apartment, some CSS glitches on my homepage, and just generally less stuff accomplished than I'd hoped...

Moving on to news and starting with the largest first, I decided not to apply to PhD programs. As much as I'd like to continue my education, I'm just not certain enough, one semester in, what specific things I want to work on. Also, as much as I want to work on pie-in-the-sky research--and, wow, would I--I am awfully tired of being a student: the undergraduate feel of my MLIS program has worn me down far more than I would have expected, going in. And while I know a PhD program wouldn't have the same kind of atmosphere to it, I still find my motivation to continue being a student is pretty much gone, for the time being. I want to go out in the world and do stuff.

On that note, I'll be attending the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference in February. I applied for a scholarship, and to my utter surprise and delight, I won. I think it will be a tremendous help to me, as that's the area of the field I'm looking at... but I don't feel like I fully understand what the current state of the art is, or where I would best fit in. I'll learn a lot and hopefully make some good contacts, there.

I'm still signed up for four classes and a field placement, in addition to my 13-hour-a-week internship and the most exciting volunteer position ever. Yep, it turned out my meeting was just a meeting, not an interview, and he actually had me start that afternoon. So, officially, I am a volunteer at the National Aviary, helping to put their library together. They have a small but solid collection of books and journals, which I will help to put in order. For now, their "catalog" will be an Excel spreadsheet; perhaps once I've got a handle on what's there and how much time it will take to get everything together I can talk them into an open-source OPAC of some sort. But there's plenty to keep me busy now.

The field placement is also going well. I didn't get enough hours in December to finish by the end of the spring semester, but I can take an incomplete and finish early in the summer. It's going to be a good experience: I should come out of it pretty knowledgeable about institutional repositories and open access.

It's going to be an incredibly busy semester, but I am excited.

Labels: aviary, classes, crafts, employment, internship, libraries, library school, on a personal note, scheduling

I made a schedule change, folks. See, my backup plan, should I end up hating academia in five years (look, I know I would like to be some flavor of academic librarian, certainly, but I'm also aware that I have yet to fight my way through real-life academic politics; Masters students--even research-based ones--are shielded from all that, particularly if they're lucky enough to have the least dramatastic advisor of all time), is to be a Young Adult Librarian. So I figured it wouldn't hurt to take one class in that, particularly since the one semi-high-workload class I thought I'd take was likely to have some repeat content in it, for me. Analyzing massive amounts of data and presenting it coherently? Yeah, been there.

Here's my new schedule:
Monday 3-6: Academic Librarianship
Tuesday 6-9: Resources for Young Adults
Wednesday 11-3: Work, 6-9: Retrieving Information
Rotating/Online: Introduction to Cataloging and Classification
Friday 11-4: Work
Alternating Saturday 1-5 and Sunday 4-8: Work
Hopefully one day a week (Thursday, if possible): Volunteering
5 hours a week, somewhere in there: Field Placement at CMU
One Saturday a month, 7:30-10:30am: Volunteering at Planned Parenthood

I have trouble believing that the [first] volunteer position I mention above is actually going to work out, because it's just too good to be true. You see, if you said to me, "Coral, if there were any place in Pittsburgh--any place at all, and forget what your degrees are in--where you could work, where would it be?", I would name this place. I'm e-mailing back and forth with their acting librarian (he has fantastic credentials, but none of them are specifically library-related, other than his caring for their collection up until now), and we have a meeting set up for the week after next. He makes it sound like he's not so much interviewing me as showing me what I would be working on and letting me decide whether or not I'm up to it. To which, of course, the response is "Hell yes!" ... Only, you know, more professionally phrased. I am unbelievably psyched about this position. But I really shouldn't even say as much as I have, until I'm really sure it'll happen. I really, really, really want for it to happen. When/If it's for sure, I'll post with more details... like the name of the place.

The CMU Field Placement is also, I guess, not 100% definite? It's likely. My would- or will-be boss has collected my demographic information and described the project at a high level, and I have the ideal faculty advisor for the project, as well. ... I'll wait and describe that better when I have a clearer handle on what I would/will be doing. But it's digital library (repository) stuff, and there's an intellectual property/copyright aspect to it. It's exciting.

I'm seriously psyched about next semester. Nervous, too, because wow will I be busy. (Then again, I won't be hopped up on Ny-/Dayquil, or running on decreased oxygen, we hope, so my capacity for work will be higher. Also, I don't think any of my classes require weekly essays on multiple books and articles, like my one class this semester did. So that's a win.)

Labels: classes, scheduling

I know I use this blog a lot more to talk about what's wrong than what's right; maybe that's human nature, or maybe it's just mine. I tend to belong to the "if nobody points out it's broken, how can we fix it?" school of thought, which can be very useful. But too much focus on the negatives can bring you down and make you lose track of what's going right.

And, really, there's an awful lot that's going right. Most on my mind: I'm poised to enter a profession that is dynamic and interesting and has so much going on that it's hard to choose where to focus. ("It's hard to choose" looks a little complainy, but I really don't think having four or five totally separate areas I'd be thrilled to work on is a bad thing.)

I also live in a great city-town (Pittsburgh is this hybrid thing that's neither city nor town), and when I sit back and take the time to reflect, my little heart is warmed thinking about the new and old friends I have here. I really like these people and am happy to have them in my life. My farther-away friends make me both sad and happy to think about; I miss them, but I'm so proud and happy to call them my friends. And for all the time spent separated, the reunions are all the more joyous.

I have a partner who loves me and whom I love back, three mischievous pets (and two frogs--no mischief there), a warm and comfortable place to live, a cup of coffee in front of me, and a Thanksgiving dinner at my friends' warm and inviting house to look forward to this afternoon. I also have a pretty good shot at straight A's (or at least A-minuses) this semester, a part-time job that I like and that will help me get full-time employment before long, a fully-functional computer with all the bells and whistles I need, new vanilla-smelling soap for my shower, and several different types of purple pens.

And my bronchitis is mostly gone. I can breathe, and it is wonderful.

It's kind of a nice feeling, making lists of what's right in one's world. (This list isn't comprehensive. I've got a couple of chickens I choose not to count out loud yet.) I encourage you all to do the same, to yourself or in your blog or wherever seems best. And have a happy Thanksgiving!

Labels: on a personal note