Temporary Disturbances in the Force

Posted November 7, 2015 by Amy Wilson

Hello there!

I’ve had trouble finding time to write recently because work has been incredibly busy. I like my job for many reasons, one being that my firm offers great benefits, like sabbaticals every 10 years; however, in the last two weeks, one coworker’s sabbatical overlapped with another person’s honeymoon. Doing the job of three specialists has made me feel like a battle droid running around with its head cut off. This week, one of my coworkers is back, so things have quieted down a bit.

Finding time to celebrate Halloween!

I have definitely started to find a healthy balance when it comes to school work, and my last few assignments have come back with high marks. I felt confident enough, when I registered for classes next semester, to sign up for 9 credits instead of 6 – kind of.

It will work like this: during spring break in March my adviser, Jim Matarazzo, is teaching a week long class called “Special Libraries,” which is 3 credits like any other course, but meets from 9-5 like a regular job. This means that I will have to plan to use some of my PTO from work, but I can cut out a class later in my program and finish sooner than the 2 1/2 year track that I am on now. This works out well, because I was worried when I found out that it’s not really possible to do two classes during the shorter summer term.

My other two courses next spring will be one of our core requirements, LIS 407 (Information Sources and Services a.k.a. Reference) and the more focused LIS 437 (Legal Information Services). 437 should be especially applicable for me, as I hope to eventually work in a law library or similar space. My foundations course requires us to write a literature review (due in less than a month now, on December 3!) on the information behavior of a specific user group, and I chose lawyers because I thought it would be interesting and useful. I also had the idea to reach out to a colleague in my firm’s library, and he helped me to identify some helpful resources. This weekend I plan to dig into the reading phase of my research!

Outside of school, there is something interesting that happened at work. I’m on the “Innovation Board,” which fields and implements project ideas from our Information Services group. One of the recent ideas was to host targeted TED talks for IS and then have a discussion about the video. My colleague in DC and I took this on, and a few weeks ago we hosted our first one. About 30 people combined attended our events, and discussed a talk by Tony Fadell called “The first secret of design is . . . noticing.” It was so successful that I had the idea afterward of counting these quarterly events toward our firm’s required annual training hours. This week, after getting clearance, I e-mailed our participants to let them know that they would be given credit for the event, and to spread the word to boost attendance in the future! Hopefully training will be a great incentive, and people will continue to come to these casual but educational talks. I really enjoy them because my department is a little separate from the rest of IS, so it gives me a chance to get to know people in my local office. I also love any chance to break my normal routine and get away from my desk.

Just for fun, here is a picture of my boyfriend and me in our Halloween costumes this weekend. Can you tell which one I am?

Classes