We’re In the Home Stretch!

Posted April 3, 2019 by Sarah Callanan

There are exactly five weeks left until the end of my class, and exactly four weeks left until my final group project is due.  Not to mention all the other activities, readings, and lectures to be completed.  We are in the home stretch!  The final few weeks of a semester are always overwhelmingly stressful with assignments and projects, and I don’t know about you, but my school-work-life-sleep balance is very much out of whack right now.  Last year around this time I posted some tips for dealing with stress, and I thought they might be useful to repost, so if you want to check them out, click here!

My class this semester, LIS 451: Academic Libraries, is so fascinating, and has challenged me in so many different ways.  Our semester-long group project (which is due in four weeks), really is a culmination of everything we have learned throughout this class.  This project is Committee Group Project, where we all sign up for a committee, and each committee has a task, and we submit a written report, a presentation, and we all take turns being chair during the meetings and submit a chair report.  One of the reasons why this project is so important and relevant is because committees are how work gets done in academic libraries.  I’m on the Space Planning Committee and our task is to assess and review the first floor space of a library and make recommendations for improvement.  This project really gives us a chance to use the skills we have learned this semester, and some that we are going to learn in the remaining weeks of the semester.  

One of the reasons I am enjoying this class so much is because I work in an academic library and I can see what I’m learning in class come to life when I’m at work.  Admittedly, there are some things that I’ve learned in class that I haven’t used at work, such as grant-writing, but I know I can definitely use them in the future, regardless of what type of library I get a job in after graduation.  But there have been other assignments and discussions, such as our Three Minute Teaching Assignment or our Outreach to Audiences discussions, where I can see parallels to what I do at work with what I have learned in class.  It’s really exciting to put what I have learned into practice, and use the skills that I am learning in this class and what I have learned in my previous classes at SLIS in my everyday life.