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…
Project Time!
Posted September 24, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I can’t believe we’re already into the fourth week of classes! I’ve gotten into the rhythm of classwork and due dates (thanks in part to my awesome new planner), and I’ve been balancing everything well. I have two individual projects due in early October and I’ve already started my research for them. The first is a presentation on a digital library for my Digital Libraries course, and the second is a paper on the influence of technology during a specific time period for my Social Informatics course. They are both very interesting, but I wanted to focus on my digital libraries project in this blog. One of the first topics we discussed in class is how digital libraries are difficult to define. Is a digital library literally a collection of digitized objects? Does it need to be limited to books only? Does it need to be organized by time, subject, object, or location? Should it be easy to search through? My classmates and I get to answer some of these questions by each evaluating a…
Moving on to Fall
Posted September 20, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
This week was fairly uneventful, as all I did was read teen books and sneeze a lot. I really enjoy this program in SLIS! All my assigned readings are really fun, and I never thought homework in grad school would be fun. The only hard part about being slammed with so much homework is I woke up on Monday with the sniffles. The sniffles are really no fun, especially when a sore throat follows a day or two later. Lots of naps this week with the sniffles, but by next week I should be back to Loretta’s for line dancing. For my Young Adult class, I am evaluating trends in publishing. It is so interesting, and makes my course seem so relevant to the profession I will be going into in about a year. The critical texts we read correspond with the assigned young adult books we read, which is really nice. In my other class, I have a lot of textbook readings about story structure. I’ve always loved writing, so I don’t mind…
Intro to Programming
Posted September 18, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I wrote a post last year explaining all the different ways that discussion happens in online classes (http://blogs.simmons.edu/slis/student-experience/2019/04/participation.html). This semester, I have another new format for my Introduction to Programming course (LIS 485), and it relies on mainly on classmate feedback. Each week, we have to complete a lab and an assignment. The lab is where we practice our coding skills, and the assignment is where we answer questions and/or perform a coding task related to what we’ve learned in the lab. It’s very similar to the format of Technology for Information Professionals (LIS 488), except that now we are required to post our work to the forums for our classmates to review. I was pretty anxious about this at first. In a normal class, if I mess up, I’m the only one who knows besides the professor. With this format, there’s no secrecy. If I struggle or have the wrong answers, everyone will know. What if my classmates judge me for being wrong? Thankfully, this has not been the case. It turns out that…
Change the Subject: Dartmouth Students Take on the Library of Congress
Posted September 16, 2019 by Katie Carlson
What better way to spend Friday the 13th than at school watching a documentary about the weight of — and potential harm associated with — naming as well as the intersections of subject headings and activism? I did just that, settling in for a viewing and panel discussion of “Change the Subject,” which follows “a group of students at Dartmouth College, whose singular effort at confronting anti-immigrant sentiment in their library catalog took them all the way from Baker-Berry Library to the halls of Congress. ‘Change the Subject’ shows how an instance of campus activism entered the national spotlight, and how a cataloging term became a flashpoint in the immigration debate on Capitol Hill.” You can check out the trailer for yourself here. The documentary was fabulous, but the high point was hearing from all of the panelists. Óscar Rubén Cornejo Cásares joined us via Skype. He is a former undocumented student activist who was involved with CoFIRED (Coalition for Immigration Reform and Equality at Dartmouth), and one of the film producers. He is currently…
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…
Keeping Track
Posted September 10, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
My first week of the semester went well. Usually the first week is a bit lighter than the rest of the semester, with the professors introducing themselves and giving a basic overview of the courses, and the students answering some forum questions to get to know each other and the course topic. Week two is where the more serious work starts. I certainly have a lot of work this semester, with several group projects, research papers, and presentations. I was overwhelmed when I first read my course syllabi. For my first two semesters, all my classes have followed a similar format, with Day 1 being the first day of class, and Day 7 being the due date for the assignments. I didn’t write down any deadlines, because I knew that I had to get everything done by the end of the week. It was pretty simple to manage. This semester, however, is different. All my classes have work due on Day 7, but two of my three classes have additional work due before the last…
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…
Getting Ready
Posted September 3, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
Where did the rest of the summer go? I feel like I just finished my summer classes and now I’m starting my fall classes. I managed to pack a lot of reading and audiobook listening into the past few weeks (my favorite book was Daughter of Molokai by Alan Brennert and my favorite audiobook was Circe by Madeline Miller), which is great because I don’t think I’m going to be able to spare much time for recreational reading from now on. I’m taking three classes this semester and I’m a bit nervous that it will be too much. The good thing is that I don’t have to take three classes, and if I feel that the workload is overwhelming then I can drop a class. I’ll see how this week goes. But I’m very good at setting up a schedule for myself and I feel confident that I can juggle the three classes. Plus, each class seems very interesting and I really don’t want to miss any of them. The class I’m most excited about…