Erin Wood
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Hi everyone! I’m Erin, and this is my second semester at SLIS in the Archives Management concentration. I grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts and yes, I do love roast beef sandwiches and drinking watered down Dunkin iced coffee. In 2020, I graduated from Emerson College with a Bachelor of Arts in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. My goal is to work in a rare book library while writing novels on the side. Right now, I am a barista at a teeny coffee shop in my hometown where I make pretty pictures out of milk and drink excessive amounts of caffeine. In my free time I like to read, play the Sims, and pickle vegetables.
Entries by Erin Wood
Managing work and classwork is one of the most difficult parts of graduate school. Of course, the coursework is challenging but working full-time while being a full-time (or part-time!) master’s student is exhausting. There are a lot of students who juggle multiple jobs alongside school and manage to make it out alive. You can do it too! I am currently stuck in the interview phase for jobs in libraries and archives, so I’m on the customer service grind working early mornings as a barista. If you’ve ever worked in food service or retail, you know how draining it can be. I acknowledge that working early mornings gives me more time in my day following work, but by the time I’ve worked 8 hours, I’m so exhausted that I can’t even think straight. I am sure every working graduate student can relate to the feeling, no matter the job. The good news is, there are things you can do to make this whole grad school journey a bit smoother. For me, I found that structure was…
You love books and decide you want to go into library science, but during your research you find out you’ll have to work closely with computers and even learn how to code. You aren’t great with technology, you studied humanities in undergrad, you can’t learn code! If this sounds like you, don’t worry, that was me too. In fact, that’s how it is for a lot of people entering the field. Technology is scary! But I promise it’s not as scary as it seems, and I’m so bad with technology I often refer to myself as a “grandma” when it comes to doing anything beyond opening a word document. In fact, my own Nana was definitely better with technology than me. You are not expected to know anything about coding prior to entering library science school, professors tend to operate under the assumption that everyone is a beginner because, more often than not, that is the case. From my experience, my professors have been extremely thorough, provide us with a lot of helpful resources, and…
We’re officially a month into the semester, and it feels great to be back into the swing of things. The adjustment of being back on campus the first couple of weeks can be a bit brutal, especially for commuters like me. I just live on the North Shore, but SLIS students commute in from all over the place, I have had classmates who live in New Hampshire and Rhode Island! Regardless of where you’re commuting from, you need a plan. Thankfully, Simmons has a parking garage on campus where students can park at a reduced rate. However, some people don’t want to drive in the city and would rather have a more public-transit centered commute. Personally, I have never parked in the Simmons garage, preferring to park at a t-stop in Revere and take the train from there. As to the station you decide to park at, that depends on what works best for you! If possible, though, I would recommend not parking at an orange line stop just because there’s usually limited parking if…
After finishing my undergraduate degree in the Spring of 2020, I knew I needed a break. I always knew that I wanted to go to graduate school, but I couldn’t decide what for. I had gotten my bachelor’s degree in writing with the goal of doing just that, write. However, after I graduated, I realized that I didn’t know what I wanted to do full-time. I was worried that if I wrote for my job every day, I would lose inspiration to write books, which was always, and still is, my goal. So, this left me asking myself what I did want to do. I felt like I had been rushing from one thing to another all my life and had never taken time to actually think. I ended up deciding to take a step back and keep working as a barista. I loved my job, and honestly in the Spring of 2020 it was a miracle I still had one to begin with, so staying where I was and figuring it out seemed like…
