Student Snippets A Window Into The Daily Life & Thoughts of SLIS Students

Week 3

Week 3 of the spring semester went by really fast! I’m reading a book called Off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam, about how we perceive time. Apparently units of time that are similar to one another seem shorter in retrospect than times when exciting or new things happen. I guess it makes sense that the third week of the semester would seem shorter since it was similar to the second week! 

My team for Systems Analysis (LIS 621) met on Monday night and set that as our regular meeting time since we have collaborative work due every week. This week, we developed interview questions and then role-played with them as if two of us were the Simmons registrar and the rest were systems analysts figuring out requirements for a new registration system. I volunteered to play one of the registrar roles, since I enjoy making things up and acting. It was fun to improvise answers to the questions and try to keep a straight face. We recorded the conversation and posted it to our class slack channel. 

Group projects and assignments at Simmons have been some of the most rewarding learning experiences of the program for me. In high school and college, group work was really hit or miss, and it was pretty rare in both of my major programs in college. When I arrived at Simmons and saw lots of group work planned for all of my courses, I started dreading it. When we actually started working in groups, though, things went really well. My first amazing group project team was in Technology for Information Professionals (LIS 488). We designed a tutorial on a crowd-sourced map resource. We also spent a lot of time chatting about SLIS and our lives in general, which has been the case in many of my group project teams since then.