SLIS
Accepted Student Luncheon (as a Current Student)
Posted April 23, 2019 by Maria Reilova
March/April is such a busy time at the admissions office at SLIS, where I work part-time, and just a few weekends ago, we had the Accepted Student Lunch on our Boston Campus for everyone admitted into SLIS for the Fall. I attended to participate on the student panel, help out with the concentration breakout sessions, give one of the largest tours I’ve done so far, and most importantly enjoy a delicious free lunch chatting with future students in the program. What I really liked about being able to participate in this event, is that I actually attended the Accepted Student Lunch last Spring before I was a student, and it was certainly a valuable experience for me as someone who had never been to campus before and was still a little hesitant about moving so far from home (and the sunshine). I remember being the first to arrive at my table and being super nervous about almost everything. Luckily, a few of the other people at my table were interested in the same concentration as…
Baptism by Twitter Fire
Posted April 22, 2019 by Katie Carlson
Somehow I never caught twitter fever. I’ve technically owned a twitter since 2013, but I’ve done very little in terms of operating it. Paging through the archive, I can tell I was stressed about starting college, because the summer of 2014 was by far my most active and angst-filled twitter period! Even so, I only tweeted 50 times. I bring this up because my Collection Development and Management course (LIS 453) had a social media assignment due this week! We had to tweet about promotions, publicity, displays, and other relevant & useful information related to libraries. Some posts had to feature original content in the form of photos, while the rest could be exceptional retweets with commentary. While I like taking photos and think I’m funny (sometimes), brevity has never been my strength. Starting this assignment, more often than not I was hitting (or going over) the 280 character limit. That meant making four or five drafts until the tweets were slimmed down and ready to post. According to this TechCrunch article, twitter’s limit used…
Group Work Thoughts
Posted April 18, 2019 by Megan Ondricek
My family and I have been spending the kids’ spring break down in southwestern Virginia at my parents’ house and absolutely loving it. Spring is farther along in Virginia than it is up in Connecticut and all the burgeoning green and flowering trees are simply gorgeous. This trip has been so good for my soul. Having grown up in small towns and fresh country air I honestly feel suffocated living along the crowded, overdeveloped I-95 corridor. If I couldn’t get out every now and then I think I’d burst. Anyway, we are one week closer to the end of the semester with just about two weeks left of class! Things aren’t exactly winding down yet, but I’m hoping that having the end in sight will give me the strength to get through this last final push. One thing is wrapping up though, and that’s my group project for the Metadata class. We’ll be turning it in this week and viewing the presentations of the other groups for class. I used to hate group projects in…
Spring Is Here!
Posted April 17, 2019 by Sarah Callanan
Spring is here! The birds are chirping, flowers are starting to bloom, and most importantly, it is not cold outside! There is still (still!) a pile of snow in my yard that refuses to melt, but I think it is on its way out. With the weather getting warmer, it makes me think about how close the end of the semester is. We’re in Week 12! Where has all the time gone? It feels like we just started! I think a part of the reason why this semester has flown by so fast is because I’ve been so busy. I usually try and take time to relax, and lift my head out of my books, but I haven’t been doing that lately as my schedule has been getting more intense. The busier I am, and the more stressed I am, the faster time seems to go (even though it really isn’t moving quicker). I really should work harder on scheduling time for relaxation–at the beginning of each semester I start out strong and schedule time…
Participation
Posted April 16, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I’ll start with good news. I was able to register for all the classes I wanted! Yay! I also signed up for two summer courses: LIS 407, Info Sources & Services (my final required course), and LIS 439, Preservation Management. I might switch out 439 for LIS 404, Principles of Management, but it was full and I had to sign up for the waitlist. I don’t know if I’ll end up getting in, but I won’t go wrong with either course. I’m not too worried about it. Now, onto this week’s topic. One of my main questions heading into this semester was how the participation part of my classes would work, since both of them are online. The answer is: discussion forums. Each class has forums for instructor announcements and general help questions, but how many other forums there are, and how often to post to them, can vary. For my technology class, we have one main board in which we discuss current technology trends and articles. I don’t usually keep up with technology…
Meeting Connections and Chatting with Friends
Posted April 15, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
It’s early April, and you want to hang out with fellow book lovers. The obvious thing is to go to MSLA (Massachusetts School Library Association) on a rainy Sunday. MSLA is a chance for classmates you see in your classes to interact with school library teachers who are your professors, as well as other school librarians in the field. The day started off with an opening keynote on diversity, an issue very big among our community at Simmons and in public schools around the state. Many sessions were offered. I chose the talk on new AASL (American Association of School Librarians) standards, since I am working on creating lessons that align with those standards in my 461 Curriculum and Instructional Strategies class. The instructor of the session on AASL was the former Simmons SLT program manager, from about ten years ago. Half the school librarians in the session were alums of the Simmons SLT program. Throughout the guided exercises at the AASL Standards session, I was able to get good ideas for my future…
Registration Time!
Posted April 9, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
Registration for the Fall 2019 semester starts this week, and I know which classes I want to take. One of the many great things about the LIS program at Simmons is that we are required to fill out a form with all the classes we plan to take. It’s not a binding contract, but it forces you to think about what classes you want to take and when, because not all classes are offered every semester. I am a planner by nature, and I loved scheduling out my potential classes. I had to re-do my schedule when I switched from archives to the Design Your Own program, and it was a bit of a project. The archives program was relatively simple to plan out because eight of the twelve courses in the program were required. The difficulty was not what classes to take, but when to take them. The DYO, however, has only three required choices, and there are a lot more classes to choose from. This is where the Two Year Schedule came in…
Jobline for the Win
Posted April 8, 2019 by Katie Carlson
Somewhere along the way, I seem to have decided that I had too much free time as a full time student and part time employee. Looking towards the summer and itching for some real world library experience, I was trawling through the weekly Simmons Jobline posts for something that might fit. A few things caught my eye, but I knew my resume could use a revamp. Luckily for me, Maria’s post in December about meeting with Amy Ryan (former President of the Boston Public Library) for resume help gave me with the motivation I needed to meet with her myself. I was still somewhat intimidated, but went in with high hopes. Together we tore my resume to shreds, then let a new and improved one rise from the ashes! Amy was simultaneously so approachable and knowledgeable! I left feeling armed with a rad resume. Apparently the Watertown Free Public Library felt the same! I submitted an application for part time circulation work (as advertised on the Jobline) as soon as I’d made the edits Amy…
Senioritis
Posted April 4, 2019 by Megan Ondricek
If you haven’t been able to tell from some of my posts, I’ve been battling an extreme case of senioritis this semester. Now that the sun is out and the birds are singing it has become even harder for me to get down to work. I’m sitting outside right now watching my kids play and I just can’t think of anything more interesting to write about. You see, there’s a very small part of me that wants nothing more whatsoever to do with libraries, databases, websites, research, emails, and due dates from the moment I turn in my last assignment of the semester. This really is the final countdown for me, and I am so beyond excited to be almost DONE. Then there’s the question, that I’ve been getting a lot lately, of what I plan to do after I graduate. What I really want to say to people is: “Do I have to do anything after I graduate!? How about just enjoy my accomplishment and not having any more homework?” It’s fine, I know…
We’re In the Home Stretch!
Posted April 3, 2019 by Sarah Callanan
There are exactly five weeks left until the end of my class, and exactly four weeks left until my final group project is due. Not to mention all the other activities, readings, and lectures to be completed. We are in the home stretch! The final few weeks of a semester are always overwhelmingly stressful with assignments and projects, and I don’t know about you, but my school-work-life-sleep balance is very much out of whack right now. Last year around this time I posted some tips for dealing with stress, and I thought they might be useful to repost, so if you want to check them out, click here! My class this semester, LIS 451: Academic Libraries, is so fascinating, and has challenged me in so many different ways. Our semester-long group project (which is due in four weeks), really is a culmination of everything we have learned throughout this class. This project is Committee Group Project, where we all sign up for a committee, and each committee has a task, and we submit a written…