On being a person first, and a grad student second
Posted March 23, 2021 by Andrea Everett
I don’t need to tell you that grad school is hard, nor do I need to explain the challenges our current global realities present. Going into the SLIS program, I knew that I would have to protect my energy and proactively build downtime into my schedule. Also, given my borderline masochism type A personality, I am working to avoid the chronic burnout I endured during undergrad. In the rush to finish assignments, snag the perfect job, and otherwise “make the most” out of grad school, it can be easy to neglect things like relaxation and basic self-care. However, I (finally) recognize the necessity of creating structures that nourish me. In an ideal week, I stop all Simmons-related work at 6 pm every evening and take time to cook, FaceTime my friends, and partake in pleasant tomfoolery. Delineating strict boundaries between work and play, incidentally, has made me a more thoughtful and efficient student. These practices, more so than my readings about MARC records and RUSA behavioral guidelines, will guide my trajectory as a librarian and…
Spring Break and Myers-Briggs
Posted March 20, 2021 by Isabelle Raposo
The last week before spring break definitely made me ready for spring break! I had extensive assignments for all my classes and barely finished them on time after an unexpectedly chaotic weekend. I also realized mid-week that I forgot to watch the lecture videos for both of my asynchronous classes! I can catch up on them, though, and spring break does give me a little room for error. My management class assignment this week was to post about the personality traits, cultural backgrounds, and life experiences that we bring to the workplace. It was fascinating to read everyone’s responses, especially since everyone wrote long and detailed forum posts. We all took a Myers-Briggs type test to get our four-letter personality code and discussed the results in our posts. Although I have reservations about how meaningful the Myers-Briggs typing system is, people shared great insights about their personalities, using the test as a jumping-off point. A solid chunk of the class got INFJ when they took the test, a type that often gets nicknamed “The Advocate.”…
So Much Activity!
Posted March 17, 2021 by Sarah Callanan
The past few weeks have been super busy and jam-packed full of activity! I’ve attended two conferences and one workshop, and that’s in addition to school and work since my last post! First, I attended Professor Kathy Wisser’s Literature Review Workshop over Zoom. This workshop was incredibly useful for my final project in LIS 621, as one of the components is a literature review. I have written a literature review before in LIS 475, but I feel much more prepared to write this one, especially after attending the workshop. Hearing Professor Wisser clearly define the steps of the literature review and learning about concept mapping tools and matrices was especially helpful! Next, I attended NEASIS&T Annual 2021, It Took a Pandemic: Reinventing Libraries in an Era of Change. This was an all-day conference held over Zoom on March 5, 2021. This was actually the first virtual conference that I have attended in its entirety live—for the two previous virtual conferences I’ve attended, ALA Annual 2020 and ALA Midwinter 2021, I attended the majority of the…
Researching and Writing
Posted March 12, 2021 by Isabelle Raposo
The first week of March was intense! I had expected to feel overwhelmed when I started my new job, but I had forgotten how draining the first week of anything new can be. I also had some extra meetings for school in the evenings on top of my recurring team meeting and class, so I felt pretty pressed for time. In the midst of it all, I did make some delicious noodle soup and catch up with my roommate, who had been away for a couple of weeks. There were a couple of warmer days and I thought spring might be coming, but it turns out I was wrong and the cold weather was back in force. My new job is with a research organization that doesn’t have a lot of people from LIS backgrounds (none that I’ve met yet, anyway). As a result, I ended up explaining my degree to a lot of people. I think I gave a slightly different explanation to each person who asked, but each one was completely accurate. Now…
Snowpocalypse
Posted March 10, 2021 by William Crouch
The semester has been off to a pretty crazy start for me. I’ve been in Texas for nearly a year now because of the pandemic while Simmons has put its classes online. As most of the world saw, Texas went through a snowstorm the likes of which it had never seen before in February. I thought I might share my experience with how the storm affected my ability to do my classwork and how the Simmons professors were extremely understanding and adaptable to my situation. To start off, the snowstorm began to hit my part of Texas in the late afternoon of February 14th. Luckily, that was the same day that the final project for LIS 439 was due for my class and I was able to finish it before things got crazy. The next day, electricity and internet began to be erratic which made it difficult for me to access Moodle and my other two classes’ readings for that week. Most of Texas did not expect the storm to get as bad as it…
Expanding, Exploring, and Encoding: Learning HTML in LIS488
Posted March 9, 2021 by Andrea Everett
After an hour of arranging files, furiously Googling, and pleading with the technology gods, I thought I had it. With trepidation, I typed the following line: <img src=”Springsteen.jpg” alt=”Cover art for Born in the USA” width=”500″ height=”500″> I refreshed the page. BOOM! I’d successfully embedded Bruce Springsteen’s iconic backside into an HTML document. I looked at my fair-use image, set against a white background and flanked by black Times New Roman font, with pride: it was rudimentary, but I made it! Could you accurately list the number of websites you’ve visited in the past week? Of course not. Technology has been so seamlessly integrated into our lives that we are often unconscious of its influence. This has only become truer since the lockdowns began: between virtual happy hours, classes, and job application portals, most of us are conducting more of our lives online than ever before. Like the face mask, the computer has become an ever-present defining symbol of this era. I’ve spent so much time online. And yet, before taking LIS 488, I had…
Picturebook Analysis
Posted March 4, 2021 by Amie Grosshans
I had my first assignment due this week. It’s a three-to-five page paper that analyzes a two-page spread of a picturebook of our choice. I chose a book called Pete with No Pants by Rowboat Watkins. It’s about a little elephant named Pete who likes to pretend he’s something else: a boulder, a squirrel, or a cloud. Pete does not like to wear pants, though, so he only pretends to be things that don’t wear pants. It’s a fun book with cute illustrations and I would recommend reading it. I initially thought three-to-five pages was a lot to write about a picturebook, though. After all, the two-page spread had only twenty-six words. How could I spin that into three-to-five pages? As it turns out, that might not be enough for me to write about everything I want to. That’s because there are many levels on meaning in a picturebook, both in the language and the pictures. I noticed more and more detail every time I read the book. Even though there weren’t many words on the page, those words had a pattern and rhythm that I only noticed…
Welcome Blogger Andrea
Posted March 3, 2021 by Lindsey Clarke
We have a new blogger joining our team. Her name is Andrea, a Design Your Own student who recently moved to Boston from central PA! Since graduating from Vassar in 2020, Andrea has been searching for ways to bring her somewhat disparate interests together. She thinks of librarianship as something we as people are always practicing, and is more than excited to think through the implications of how we seek, sort, and use information—both within library walls and beyond. Other passions include learning new languages, listening to music, and crafting recipes around my impulse grocery purchases.
Walking around the Fens
Posted March 2, 2021 by Isabelle Raposo
I can’t believe I just finished the fourth week of the semester! I got a lot done this week and tried to front-load some assignments in advance of my job starting soon. I also ran errands to Fenway and Brookline, since when I’m working I won’t be able to go to stores in the middle of the day. Walking around the Fenway area was fun and stimulating but also a little sad. I miss being on campus! I returned a book I’d had for over a year (for pandemic reasons) to the library drop box in the Palace Road building where I used to go to classes. It was nice to have a reason to visit campus and peek at the construction happening in the quad. The area around Simmons is really lovely, and these days I gravitate towards it for reasons other than the big box stores across the Fenway from campus. I used to go to a coffee shop called Neighborhoods, which changed hands and turned into Phinista, a really cool Vietnamese cafe, this…
New Class!
Posted February 27, 2021 by Sarah Callanan
Hello everyone and welcome to the Spring Semester! At the time of writing my last post, I had not started classes yet, so now you get to hear all about how it is going! I’m taking LIS 621: Conducting Research this semester. It’s another “live” class being taught over Zoom, which is really great! This course is all about conducting research in the social sciences—according to the course description list, “This course addresses the theories, principles, and practices of social science research. It examines reflective inquiry (including the development of the problem statement, literature review, theoretical framework, logical structure, research objectives, and questions/hypotheses) and research design, data collection methods, and data analysis. The course also covers generalizability, reliability and validity, and the report and presentation of research results. Methods in quantitative and qualitative data analysis are introduced. Students are able to develop their own research proposals and select appropriate methods based on specific research questions.” It’s a doctoral level class that’s being taught by the same professor who taught my LIS 454: Digital Information Services and Providers class last semester. I…