Crunch Time

Posted April 23, 2018 by Megan Ondricek

We’ve now entered the last two weeks of the semester, otherwise known as “crunch time.” I have three end-of-semester projects on the horizon that I’m busily plugging away at. Now is the time when my kids get away with a little extra TV in the afternoons and I remind my husband daily, “just two more weeks….” The summer break is so close you can taste it, as it hovers like a sunny promise just out of reach. Oh how the pleasure reading and the hobbies and the home organization projects are calling! In my experience, you never know quite how the end will play out until it is suddenly upon you, but this semester (so far) I feel like the crunch won’t be too bad.

The end of the semester is always an exciting time, and not just for the prospect of homework-free evenings. It represents the culmination of all we’ve been studying and working on throughout the semester and usually includes some kind of presentation in front of our peers. The project I’m most excited about is the database that I’m building. All semester in Database Management we’ve been going through the steps of designing our database conceptually while practicing our coding with sample tables. Now in these last few weeks, it’s finally time to put our conceptual designs and coding knowledge into practice.

This means I’ve been spending significant portions of my week with a delightful little activity known as “debugging,” which is basically diagnosing and solving problems with your code. You’re grappling with a breakdown of communications between the human and the computer – something’s been lost in the translation. Although it can be time-consuming and aggravating (some might say excruciating), I find the whole process extremely satisfying. If I’ve learned anything from my technology classes it’s that there’s always more than one solution. Sure you could find answers online or email your professor, but the most rewarding option is to work at it until you figure it out yourself. That moment when things suddenly become clear to you or the thing actually WORKS, you feel like you could conquer the world. Such a rush.

I know I’ve said this before, but if you come to library school with an open mind and a willingness to work hard, you will grow and develop in surprising ways. Wish me luck for the rest of crunch time!