Living Grad School to the Fullest

Posted April 16, 2018 by Megan Ondricek

This post was inspired by a guest speaker we had in academic libraries – a recent SLIS West graduate that many of us knew. Marco is now a Reference & Collection Development Librarian and he gave a wonderful interactive presentation about his current job. I remember taking Collection Development with Marco and it was inspiring to see how he had made that his work and now he was behind the podium, teaching us with the very same material he had been learning just the previous year. Marco was full of confidence and enthusiasm, and it made me feel very encouraged about the value of our preparation at grad school. Observing Marco gave me something to strive toward: a vision of what I hope to achieve after graduation.

Library school is a lot of work on its own: there are some weeks when all I can do is submit assignments on time and get myself to class in some semi-prepared fashion. But I’d like it to be more than that. I’d like this to be a time of discovery and exploration and self-invention. Ideally, my Simmons degree will set the course for my professional life. I’m learning more about the field and about my own interests within it, and seeking to tailor my educational experience to those passions. I’m making huge financial and personal sacrifices to obtain this degree – might as well get as much out of it as I can.

Now I could go on and list all the important things: networking and conference-attending and career counseling and student group involvement and all that. You should certainly plan to take advantage of all of these opportunities at school. There are some other “perks” to being a Simmons student as well, like discounted memberships to professional organizations, and free subscriptions to the New York Times and Lynda.com (a great resource for supplementing your education – check it out if you haven’t already!). What I really want to say is that all these things are great, but they won’t matter much if you don’t have the WHY. I think what was so great about Marco’s presentation is that it reminded me of all the whys of library school. To really get the most out of grad school you’ve got to have your heart in it, for librarianship truly is a labor of love.