Finding Work as a Graduate Student
Posted November 20, 2025 by Laura Kiely
I moved to Boston from Iowa, where I grew up and completed my bachelor’s degree. Because my undergraduate campus was 100% residential, I had barely ever lived on my own or paid rent before! I did of course work throughout my undergraduate degree, but the money went either into savings, living expenses, and fun. So moving to Boston was quite the lifestyle change! Rent anywhere in Boston is astronomical compared to Iowa, and I had utilities and groceries and all the added expenses of adulthood. However, going to school full-time does to an extent limit one’s ability to work full-time, and vice versa. It’s not strictly the case, there are ways to make it work, but I knew I wanted to focus on academics, which meant finding part-time work. Before moving to Boston, I was sending applications all over the place, largely coming up empty-handed. I decided to expand beyond libraries and archives, into a bit wider of a net. And it worked! I am by no means wealthy, but I am making monthly rent…
Zoom School (minus lockdown)
Posted November 19, 2025 by Michaela O'Gara-Pratt
When I first toured SLIS in February of 2024, I remember my student ambassador asking me how I felt about online classes. At the time, I felt my stomach drop. When the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, I had just started my freshman year of college. After taking a gap semester in the fall of 2019, I was new to undergrad in January 2020. In retrospect, it was the worst time to start a four-year degree program. While my peers had gotten a “normal” fall to meet each other in-person, I was quickly swept up in online classes before I had made any lasting connections. It is safe to say that undergrad got off to a ~rocky~ start and I began to associate the difficulties I experienced socially with Zoom school. Eventually, I adjusted to the “new normal” (to use a buzzy term from the time), and by senior year I felt like I had attended meaningful classes, participated in as many clubs as I could, and made lifelong friends. Despite this, when exploring my…
Commuting Revisited
Posted November 17, 2025 by Emmy Mahoney
For my very first blog post, I wrote about tips for commuting to and from Simmons. My three main tips were to listen to audiobooks, call your friends, and listen to your favorite pump up playlist. Well, I have really put those tips to the test. This past summer, I moved even further from Simmons, and my commute has increased from an hour and fifteen minutes to two and a half hours. Having done this commute for half a semester now, here is what I have learned. Listening to audiobooks or a really good playlist are great tips, but calling your friends is by far the best tip that I can recommend. I have informed my friends of these extended periods of time where I am free to talk on the phone, and it has been wonderful. Much of my commute is spent catching up with my people, learning what’s new in their lives, and laughing. Sometimes, I enjoy our conversations so much, I take the long way home. One new tip that I would…
Practicum Experience
Posted November 14, 2025 by June Kramer
My practicum has come with it plenty of challenges, some that I did not expect and some that I knew were coming. I’m going to focus on the one I anticipated: my voice. Since childhood I have spoken with a stutter, and it’s especially hard to read aloud in a group full of people. Of course, going into the school library profession, I knew that this would be a frequent occurrence. In my first read-aloud, I knew that I needed to tackle it head-on. For a second grade class, I read the book “I Talk Like a River,” by Jordan Scott. It tells the story of an elementary-aged boy who stutters, and his father who refers to his stutter as “talking like a river.” In reading this book to the second graders, I was able to show them a bit of myself, and gain their trust as a full person. I also was able to teach them a little bit about disability justice, and why it’s important to be kind to those with different abilities…
Exciting Update – New JOB!
Posted November 13, 2025 by Mary Kassman
In an exciting update, I have started a new job at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library. In my new position as a Collection Management assistant, I am working on getting processed materials ready for patron use. Currently, I am working on refoldering the Sarah Schulman collection. Schulman is a prominent Lesbian writer and political activist, so there are a wide range of materials I am encountering. I get to practice my archival skills, while getting to see a firsthand account of Schulman’s personal life and career, dating all the way back to her elementary school days. Although my current work might appear mundane, it is anything but. I never know what I am going to find when moving materials to new folders and boxes, and that is what makes this job so fun. In the grand scheme of things my role is small, but I still play an important role in making information accessible. I would not be in this new position if it weren’t for SLIS. I found and applied to the position…
LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums) as Portals
Posted November 12, 2025 by Michaela O'Gara-Pratt
Yesterday, I was sitting at my desk, thinking about how if I was being recorded, it would not be obvious that I lived in the year 2025. At one of my jobs, I am currently processing a series of VHS tapes from the 1990s. Each day I am in the office, I spend hours popping in tapes, fast-forwarding and re-winding to capture specific details to write accurate descriptions of the material. The nostalgia has not worn off yet, and each time I slide one of the VHS tapes into the machine, I am transported back to being five or six years old and watching all of the programs my family owned on tape. Favorites included Angelina Ballerina, Kipper the Dog, and a series of home videos that my parents had recorded. The interior design of my library is also a little timeless. The cream walls and carpeted floors could be from any decade, and the material it holds literally is. There is something comforting about being able to drift between timelines, hopping between the present…
A Day at the (Book) Fair
Posted November 11, 2025 by Will Romey
On Sunday, I drove to Boston to attend the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. This annual event first came up in my course “Rare Books and Special Collections Librarianship” (LIS449). This course has been unexpectedly influential on my first semester at Simmons, so I was excited to take some of what I’ve learned out into the wider rare books community. After a relatively easy drive to Beantown, we parked right next to the Hynes convention center. After an espresso (adequate caffeination is a must for any literary event), we walked through the doors of the fair. We were immediately in the thick of it – rows of stalls, each containing dozens of books on display. I headed straight to Ben Kinmont’s stand, a bookseller from Caifornia who specializes in wine and gastronomy – two fields close to my heart. Although I’d studied his catalog in advance, I was thrilled to see his books in person. Highlights included a few books on viniculture from the early 1800s, some stunning marbled covers on handwritten books on Mexican…
A Little Life Update
Posted November 10, 2025 by Brooke Thomson
Hi readers! It’s been a little over two months since I moved to Boston and started my program, so I wanted to give you an update on how things are going for me now. First Things First: Have I Found a Job? Tragically, no. My plan was to allow myself a one-month cushion to find one, but you know what they say about best laid plans and all that. September came and went. Then October too. I didn’t get any offers. Today, November 7th, is actually the first time I’ve even made it to an interview: your girl applied to be a Counter Team Member at Tatte Bakery & Cafe! The interview took an hour and I feel pretty positive about it. I won’t hear back about a decision until sometime this weekend. Please keep your fingers crossed for me! Up till now, I have been spending a lot of time and energy applying to entry level positions at local libraries, museums, and historical institutions because those are the places I need to start getting…
Mid-Semester Check-In
Posted November 3, 2025 by Emmy Mahoney
It is hard to believe that we are already at the halfway point of the semester. Where has the time gone! At this point in time, I usually perform a mid-semester check-in to make sure that I am on track to ending the semester with success. Here are some of the steps I take to complete this check-in. First, I reacquaint myself with major assignments. This begins with rereading the syllabus to confirm that I have all of the assignments on my calendar. Next, I will review the major assignment instructions to make sure that I understand the project. Upon reading the assignment description, I will write down any questions that I have, so that I can reach out to peers and professors for clarification. At this point in the semester, many of the major assignments are the final project. With this in mind, I review my progress on these assignments, making sure that I am in line with my goals. Next, I like to check in with my classes. First, I consider my preparedness….
I See Its Success
Posted November 1, 2025 by June Kramer
Being student on the SLIS West campus can feel like a lot of things: a hustle, a joy, a grind, a whole lot of work, and very worth it. I’m currently in the middle of the semester, piling up assignments so that I can make room for a couple of scheduled long weekends. This means spending three days a week at my practicum elementary school, and accelerating the rate of papers that I’m writing. But I don’t feel alone in this work. The Simmons library program goes deep, especially in Massachusetts. Several people in my orbit are graduates of the program: my upcoming librarian in the spring practicum, my practicum advisor, even a co-worker at my part-time public library job. Which is to say, I am able to have confidence in the program that I am in, because I see its success all around me. When it feels like too much work to sustain, I can remember that I have this future ahead of me, working in a school and changing lives. Much of the…