Pickles and PhDs

Posted November 13, 2015 by Amy Wilson

As I approach the end of this semester (my final assignments are due 12/3 and 12/8) I am feeling an increasing sense of urgency, but also a feeling of confidence. Part of this is likely due to the fact that I have a whole weekend ahead of me with no plans, except making pickles. I’ve never pickled anything so it should be an interesting journey. Anyway, it will be nice to make some real progress on my research this weekend.

Last night I indulged in a night of crafting, Gilmore Girls, and no homework. I stitched initials onto some Christmas stockings that I bought for our apartment, and then started making a hat for my boyfriend. I learned how to knit from my old bosses in my job at the Saint Michael’s College library, Kristen and Naomi. It’s an unspoken law that librarians must learn to knit. I also have a cat, so I can check off that box too.

Last weekend I came very close to being the owner of two cats, when I heard that the MSPCA was waiving their adoption fee for adult cats (older than one year). We’ve often talked about getting a second cat as a playmate for our ornery and constantly hungry cat, Maverick (he is very well fed on an expensive diet, but Maverick considers anything less than 8 meals a day to be utter depravity). In the end, it wasn’t the right time, but eventually I think we will get a kitten. Possible names are Professor Minerva McGonagle, Zipporah, and Tesla.

Yesterday at work, I found a cool (but maybe not surprising) link between school and my job. At a meeting for our Information Services team, our training group gave a presentation about how they had recently changed their curriculum for new attorneys at our firm, and one of their goals was to provide information on a topic as the need arose, rather than give them everything they might in a long, six-hour session. They found that this prevented information overload and that the new hires are able to retain more of what they learn.

This is really relevant to the literature review that I am writing for my Foundations class, especially because I have chosen to track the information behavior of lawyers. We had to choose a population to review and I selected lawyers because I thought it would be useful to me. What I hadn’t planned on was the fact that my work and my colleagues could be a resource as well. I had some help from a coworker in our law library, who told me about some journal databases to try; then, yesterday, I even found myself thinking about my topic at the meeting. Basically, our training team was trying to identify points of uncertainty in our lawyers’ work and resolve the issues proactively.

I can’t really use this real-time information in my paper, because my assignment for Foundations is not an original study, but rather a literature review – though it certainly requires plenty original thought. Still, it’s useful to have context as I begin my research. My first piece of reading is a PhD dissertation that someone has already written on the topic, and it’s 300 pages. TGIF.