Michaela O’Gara-Pratt
Photo of Michaela O’Gara-Pratt
Hi! My name is Michaela O’Gara-Pratt (she/they) and I am a second year student at SLIS with a concentration in Archives Management. I grew up in the Boston area and graduated from Boston University in 2023 with a B.A. in psychology. Post-graduation, I worked for a year in pediatric in-patient psychiatry. After realizing I needed to pivot my career, I reflected on what I am genuinely interested in and the answer is libraries! I will always have a passion for mental health care, but I have found a home working with the collections that shape us. I have a special interest in working with art research collections, and outside of class I have both worked and interned at local art museums. In my free time I like to read spooky forest stories, ride my unicycle, and visit as many Sargent paintings as I can find.
Entries by Michaela O’Gara-Pratt
When I first toured SLIS in February of 2024, I remember my student ambassador asking me how I felt about online classes. At the time, I felt my stomach drop. When the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, I had just started my freshman year of college. After taking a gap semester in the fall of 2019, I was new to undergrad in January 2020. In retrospect, it was the worst time to start a four-year degree program. While my peers had gotten a “normal” fall to meet each other in-person, I was quickly swept up in online classes before I had made any lasting connections. It is safe to say that undergrad got off to a ~rocky~ start and I began to associate the difficulties I experienced socially with Zoom school. Eventually, I adjusted to the “new normal” (to use a buzzy term from the time), and by senior year I felt like I had attended meaningful classes, participated in as many clubs as I could, and made lifelong friends. Despite this, when exploring my…
Yesterday, I was sitting at my desk, thinking about how if I was being recorded, it would not be obvious that I lived in the year 2025. At one of my jobs, I am currently processing a series of VHS tapes from the 1990s. Each day I am in the office, I spend hours popping in tapes, fast-forwarding and re-winding to capture specific details to write accurate descriptions of the material. The nostalgia has not worn off yet, and each time I slide one of the VHS tapes into the machine, I am transported back to being five or six years old and watching all of the programs my family owned on tape. Favorites included Angelina Ballerina, Kipper the Dog, and a series of home videos that my parents had recorded. The interior design of my library is also a little timeless. The cream walls and carpeted floors could be from any decade, and the material it holds literally is. There is something comforting about being able to drift between timelines, hopping between the present…
Did you know that as a Simmons SLIS student you could attend librarian summer camp? Well…not technically summer camp, but you can take LIS 447: Collections Maintenance with Professor Donia Conn. This two week course, taking place during the summer semester at the North Bennet Street School, feels a lot like a very cool, very niche summer camp. I was lucky to take this course over the summer of 2025. When I toured Simmons in 2023, the North Bennet Street School came up in conversation because I knew a few people who had taken courses there. The student ambassador giving the tour quickly shared that Simmons offered a course taught by one of their professors at the North Bennet Street School because they had the studio space and book binding equipment for the course. I was excited to learn about the course and hoped I would be able to squeeze it into my schedule. I am happy to report that the course was everything I hoped it would be. During our two weeks in the…
As a child, I grew up fascinated by the architecture of my local public library. Designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, the decorative wood interior has always sparked my imagination and creativity. The settings of the fantasy novels I grew up reading seemed to come alive inside of the stained-glass windows created by John La Farge. I am glad that in the late 19th century there was a push to make public spaces so beautiful. In many ways, a lot of these old New England libraries are more accessible museums. An individual can visit the murals painted by John Singer Sargent at the Copley Branch of the Boston Public Library without the entry fee associated with the Museum of Fine Arts, which also holds examples of Sargent’s murals. As a budding librarian with an interest in art, I am excited by the intersections of art and public education. Recently, the Boston Public Library received a significant donation to restore the third floor of the historic McKim Building. This project would increase public access to some of…
I have been doing a lot of job interviews recently. As a second-year student at SLIS, applying for jobs this year feels a lot different than it did last fall when I first started the program. I have new skills to highlight on my resume, and I have the knowledge I have gained from internships and coursework. Despite this, I am still new to applying to jobs in the field and I have discovered that interviews are a great place to learn more about what these jobs really look like, even if you are not offered a position after the interview. Historically, I have always been a big fan of informational interviews. I enjoy conversation and I feel like I learn a lot about my options by talking to people who have been in similar situations. Before I pivoted to Library Science, I worked at an in-patient psychiatric care unit. At the time, I thought I wanted to work full-time as a mental healthcare professional, so I spoke to everyone I could. I scheduled meetings…
