The Home Stretch

Posted November 15, 2014 by Samantha Quiñon

Classes end the first or second week of December (depending on whether or not the class started in the first or second week of September). This generally means that SLIS students are working on a final project for every class right about now. This isn’t like undergrad. There is no big final examination. It’s intense.

For one class I have to build a working website with five HTML pages and use CSS manipulation, which I’m sure is no big deal for some people, but it’s a huge deal for me. For another class (Reference), I have to work with a group of four other people to create a 40-minute tutorial for a medical database called PubMed. I’m gearing up by watching video guides that PubMed currently has posted on its website. The shortest one is an hour, and it covers just one aspect of the site. It’s going to be interesting to see how we condense all of this information into a manageable, cogent presentation. I also have a literature review due for my archives class. I didn’t even know what a literature review was until two days ago when I started doing research. And I still don’t know anything about Chicago Style (which I have to use for it), except that footnotes and endnotes are terrible and a sign that archival literature needs to evolve already and use APA. All the classes have other assignments due in addition to these, but these are the big ones that have me up late at night, hunched over my computer, losing sleep, hair, and tears.

So this is the glamorous life of an LIS graduate student. Really, it’s better than this, but I feel like complaining right now, since all of my peers are too busy to distract me. And while I’m complaining I really should add that I’m learning a lot by doing these final projects–way more than I would cramming for some cumulative multiple-choice test. But that’s the point. I know I’ll be really proud (and relieved) when I’ve completed everything.