Students
Always Say Yes to Free Pizza
Posted September 25, 2019 by Maria Reilova
Having survived a crazy, first few weeks of the semester full of extensive planning, and then replanning, I’m starting to finally feel settled again. And with the start of a new semester here at Simmons is all the fun events! Since I haven’t been an on-campus student since last Fall, it was really great coming back and seeing so many familiar faces! An event that I remembered hearing about last fall, that I was lucky to be able to actually attend this fall, was Pizza with the Dean. Besides the obvious reasoning of free food, I thought this was a really great opportunity to actually meet and talk with our COCIS Dean Marie desJardins in a casual, conversational setting. If there is one goal I have been really trying to work on throughout grad school, it is being more outgoing in a work meets social type setting. Networking has always been a terrifying concept for me and, while I like to think I am an interesting person to talk to, once I start interacting with…
A Break for Some Fun!
Posted September 12, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
This week, I tried to have some fun. I was assigned three books to read this week for my YA Library Collections class I spent most of my week studying and reading! The books are: Judy Blume’s Forever; Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly; and Looking for Alaska by John Green. I gave myself a goal on Monday. If I could finish all of the readings for my Writing For Children class, and get halfway done with Looking For Alaska, then I would do something fun on Tuesday night. Howdy, cowgirl! Out I went to a country bar. Walking from Simmons to Fenway, I had never realized how “hopping” the area is. Before heading to Fenway on a Tuesday night, I checked to make sure there was no Red Sox game. The crowds out in Fenway Park can get crazy on game night. With no game, I was good to go line dancing. Growing up listening to country music, I was really excited to learn that there is a country bar in Boston. With…
Who Knew Fidelity Investments has a Library?
Posted September 6, 2019 by Maria Reilova
Hello, Student Snippet readers! Long time no see(read?)! Happy start of the new semester, I have had one of the busiest summers of my life this year. For a quick recap: I had to put my on-campus job in the SLIS admissions office on hold since I was working at Fidelity Investments full-time as their Research Services Intern, while also taking Metadata online which was offered this summer as the SLIS travel course to Yonsei University in South Korea! Since I could write about my trip to South Korea for ages, I thought I’d focus my first “back-to-school” blog post, on my internship this summer. I found and applied for my summer internship using the SLIS jobline. I was fortunate enough interview, and be offered the internship at Fidelity Investments in Boston, where I would be working with their research services team. Now I’m sure I am not alone in that I had no idea that Fidelity even had a library, and with it some super cool librarians! Because it was a corporate library, the…
Tidbits of the Week/end
Posted September 5, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
This has been quite the busy week! I started off my week with grocery shopping, and will finish the week with my LIS-483 “Library Collections and Materials for Young Adults” class. Grocery shopping may seem a very mundane chore, but I love finding new ethnic food shops around Boston. Boston is a city that welcomes people from all different cultures. In Allston, there are Asian food shops and even a market with a few different Asian restaurants called Food Connection. I am not your typical Asian, and most definitely not your typical American. My father is from India, and I was excited to find a huge Indian grocery store in Somerville, a suburb of Boston, so I did another round of grocery shopping Monday evening. Friday evening, I went to Kiki’s Market in Brighton. Kiki’s Market has specialty Irish foods, such as Irish brands of cookies and chocolates. After visiting Ireland only a few months ago, it was nice to see name brands I recognize, and my favorite Irish tea at a discounted price. Most…
Focus on EBSCO
Posted August 29, 2019 by Katie Carlson
On August 13th I was able to participate in a focus group for the new EBSCO mobile app! I really love workshopping, and this felt like that to the extreme. It was awesome to have a say in a product that I will get to reap the benefits from, as well as pass on to patrons, friends, and future researchers alike. This particular focus group was definitely saturated with library and information science students. I personally knew half of the group members, and recognized most of the others! Involvement in LIS definitely informed our reaction to the EBSCO mobile app. Most people in this section of the focus group entered with an understanding of EBSCO’s products and an interest in user experience (at least enough to sign up for the study). It was great to hear the opinions of other library science students, but I would have also loved more input from people outside the field. Does the average Bostonian conducting research care about how many times a paper has been cited in other academic…
Trying my Hand at Student Leadership
Posted May 13, 2019 by Maria Reilova
Taking online coureses this semester has been really great in terms of flexibility in my schedule for my part-time job, and for my internship, but it has been not so great for socializing and being involved at campus events. Since I did not have to come to campus as often for class or meetings for group projects, I spent way more time these past few months in my bed then I’d like to admit. So to get out of my comfort zone and really try to challenge myself, I decided to run for a leadership position in Panopticon,(the student art librarianship student organization). Which means you can now call me Madame Secretary! I knew I wanted to get more involved since time is going by so fast and I want to experience as much as a can in grad school before it’s over! Panopticon has always been the student group I have been most interested in, and I am so excited to now be a part of their leadership team. Having a background in art…
(Graf)fiti Walk
Posted May 13, 2019 by Katie Carlson
Lucky readers, this week you get to hear about (and see) Panopticon’s Graffiti Walk with Ann Graf from two points of view because Maria and I both attended! When I saw the Graffitti Walk advertised in the weekly LISSA email update, I knew I had to make it a priority. I took LIS 415: Information Organization with Profesor Graf (along with Maria), and was fascinated when Ann told us about her thesis. Ann’s research looks at controlled vocabularies (retrieved from the Getty Research Institute’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus) and the description of art (especially graffiti and street art), so she was the ideal person to lead this walk! Everyone met at Brookline Booksmith (except for me, due to a late start), and meandered down Harvard Ave in search of anything tagged with spray paint. When I eventually met up with the group, we wandered down side alleys and behind businesses in search of street art treasure! I’m surprised (but grateful) that no crotchety manager or chef came out to interrogate us! There were plenty of…
End of Semester Reflections
Posted May 6, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I can’t believe my first semester is over! It sounds cliché but I really did learn a lot. When I first read my course syllabi, I was very intimidated by everything we were going to cover. I had no idea what most of the topics even were, so it’s really gratifying to be able to identify and understand them now. While I might not have mastery over all the concepts, I do feel like I have a strong foundation for my remaining classes. Even better, my brain has started to think like a librarian! I’ve been paying a lot more attention to how the library catalog is set up, examining the call numbers, and thinking about descriptions and relationships between authors and their works. There is a whole complex structure of organization and classification that I never paid attention to before. It’s exciting to be able to “read” and understand some of that code. And speaking of coding, I can’t believe I not only survived but thrived in my tech course. I would not have…
One Week Left!
Posted May 4, 2019 by Sarah Callanan
My final group project for LIS 451: Academic Libraries is done! Completed! Turned in! As I’ve mentioned in a few previous posts, the final project for LIS 451 is a Committee Group Project which you work on with a group throughout the semester. The final product was a written report as well as a recorded presentation. As this is an online class, my group collaborated via Google Docs and presented our project using Voicethread. I was on the Space Planning Committee, where our charge was to assess the current use of first floor space in a library and make specific recommendations for improvement. One of our group members is actually a library director at an academic library (she is a Ph.D. candidate) so we chose to use the library she works at as our model. This project was really interesting and useful as this task is something that a Space Planning Committee could have actually been given in an academic library. Additionally, this project was great in another way that I didn’t think of until…
SLIS Career and Networking Fair – Come for the Networking, Stay for the Swag & Brownies
Posted April 29, 2019 by Maria Reilova
Every spring, SLIS Student Services puts on the annual SLIS Career and Networking Fair for the students and alumni of the program. I am have been looking for some summer internship or part-time opportunities in Boston and I really wanted to attend this event as an informative experience, and a chance to practice my networking skills (something that still stresses me out constantly and I am always trying to improve). I am so happy I went. Even though I did initially have to hype myself up a bit with some caffeine. It was really nice to attend a career fair that was actually catering to my specific field. In undergraduate, I attended one career fair and since my college had a lot of business and technology students I did not feel too well represented as an art history student. There were definitely ways I could apply my liberal arts degree to different careers at the fair but it was nice to have that taken care for me at the Simmons SLIS Career Fair. Some of the…