Always Say Yes to Free Pizza
Posted September 25, 2019 by Maria Reilova
Having survived a crazy, first few weeks of the semester full of extensive planning, and then replanning, I’m starting to finally feel settled again. And with the start of a new semester here at Simmons is all the fun events! Since I haven’t been an on-campus student since last Fall, it was really great coming back and seeing so many familiar faces!
An event that I remembered hearing about last fall, that I was lucky to be able to actually attend this fall, was Pizza with the Dean. Besides the obvious reasoning of free food, I thought this was a really great opportunity to actually meet and talk with our COCIS Dean Marie desJardins in a casual, conversational setting. If there is one goal I have been really trying to work on throughout grad school, it is being more outgoing in a work meets social type setting. Networking has always been a terrifying concept for me and, while I like to think I am an interesting person to talk to, once I start interacting with professionals I look up to, I find my mind always goes blank.
What made this event so perfect? It was a relatively small group of us, around 12 students total, and Marie was so lovely and easy to talk to about both fun topics — like her go-to coffee shop/cafe in Boston, (Athan’s Bakery near the Washington Square T stop in Brookline for those curious!) and on more serious topics such as keeping the word ‘library’ in the school of library and information science, despite the trend of other universities becoming just ‘information schools’. Another great opportunity that Marie discussed with us is that since COCIS is one of 4 graduate colleges at Simmons, she would love to see more cross enrollment amongst the programs; for example, LIS students taking courses in the School of Social Work or Management courses in the School of Business.
I’m glad I went to this event, not only because I got to speak and hear from our COCIS dean, but also because it was a great way to hear from my peers in the program too. Everyone at Simmons is coming from all sorts of backgrounds, whether that means straight out of undergrad, or people looking for a career change/broadening their professional skills. The fact that Simmons offers these type of events for students is really helpful, and I feel it’s reflective of the program itself. As librarians, we can always benefit from collaborating with each other. It was just an added bonus that in this case there just happened to be free pizza involved!