Shooting for Par, Pigeons, and Career Preparation

Posted August 7, 2012 by Sarah Barton

Last week I tried two things that I had never done before: golfing and shooting a gun. In both activities, my shots were pretty poor. Frankly, some of them were downright awful. Having never done a sport that focuses exclusively on minutia, golfing and skeet shooting served as total wake up calls. A golf swing has to be one of the most finicky skills in all of sports, and I still can’t figure out why those clay targets are called pigeons – their size more closely likens them to hummingbirds. Alas, despite the particularity of golfing and shooting and the fact that I was certainly not a natural at either one, I enjoyed them both. If I have a future in either activity (golf is the front-runner at this point), I will need to put in many, many hours of practice.
Boy is it frustrating to try something new and enjoy it, only to realize that obtaining any sort of skill in it would require taking it up as a part-time job. (Finally, here comes the library tie-in.) One of the best aspects of GSLIS is that once you get started and realize how much you love libraries, you have the opportunity to get your library fix while taking classes.
The start of the fall semester is certainly not going to help my golf game, but I’d like to think that I’ll have plenty of time for golf once I graduate and land a sweet library job. So, while improving my golf and shotgun shots are future ambitions, for now my best shot is dedicated to making the most of GSLIS. They say that practice makes perfect, and I plan to pack the fall semester with a part-time job and an internship to serve as practice toward perfecting my library interests. Golf can wait.