GOOOO Team!

Posted October 20, 2012 by Maggie Davidov

To be a GSLIS student is to be a team player. Group work, as I am finding out, is an essential part of this program. In my undergrad years I was a theater major so I guess I was working on group project, or plays, all the time but I never thought about it that way. Lately, as I wind down one group project and start up two more, it truly has been tickling my fancy, this whole idea of a paper or project’s success or failure linked with someone else’s. I think it pushes us to do better, forces us to swim harder because we’re buoyed to one another and it’s sink or swim together. Being the eternal optimist that I am, I am constantly dreading the evaluation at the end where my fellow teammates will rip me to shreds and tell the professor I was one very bad person to work with and I should be shunned to the dungeons of Moodle to await trial by Zotero (seriously, don’t those programs sound like fairytale locations…anyone?).
But as I start to embrace Google drive and learn more about my group members on Skype conferences I begin to really enjoy the medium. Who likes working alone all the time? I think many of us are drawn to the library profession because we like to help others find what they are looking for. This naturally makes us adept at group work. My reference professor tells us stories about some of his extra fun exchanges at the reference desk, and the one commonality all his anecdotes have is his constant refrain, “Let’s work on this together.” This is a team project for him. With the patron, the information about the subject, and the librarian with the know-how and navigation sense, the sky’s the limit in terms of accomplishment. With a group of librarians-in-waiting working on something together I can’t help but think: Oh the places they’ll go.