Erin Wood

Experience in the Form of Volunteering

The job market can be competitive, especially when you lack experience. It can feel impossible to get employers to even look at your resume, and it’s disheartening! However, volunteering with your local institutions can be an easy way to build up a resume and make connections. Most local libraries, archives, and historical societies are constantly looking for volunteers. Of course, we would all prefer to do paid work, but the perk of volunteering is that it allows you to get experience on your own time. I recently started volunteering at the Danvers Historical Society, where upon hearing I was an archives management student, they were thrilled to give me some of their backlog to work through and send over to the town archives. I go in a couple days a week on my days off from work and get to sort through a ton of interesting materials. Danvers, like most towns and cities in Massachusetts, has a rich history, and it’s fascinating to see how things have changed over the years. It’s also shed some…

Halfway Through My Degree

Around this time last year, I had just begun my very first semester at SLIS. It is crazy to think about how I am now halfway done with my degree! In only a year, my life has changed so drastically, and I could not be more thankful for this program. With the more generalized courses under my belt, this semester I am taking more specific classes that focus on the areas of librarianship I want to explore in my professional life. I am currently taking LIS-442 Establishing Archives and Manuscript Programs, which focuses on staff and program management within archives; LIS-476 Outreach and Advocacy for Cultural Heritage, focusing on the roles outreach and advocacy play within the operation of a healthy cultural heritage institution; and LIS-439 Preservation Management, which explores the foundations of preserving physical objects within cultural heritage institutions. Each of these classes cover an aspect of the field that I am really interested in, so I am excited for what is to come this semester. When I first started this program, I thought…

Juggling Work and School

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…

So, You’re Afraid of Technology?

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…

Commuter Tips

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…

Taking Time To Figure It Out

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…