Spring Days/Planning for Fall
Posted April 16, 2016 by Amy Wilson
I had been putting off writing a post this week because I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to say. It was a pretty quiet week – my boyfriend came home from a business trip on Tuesday, and he left again this morning, so we really just squeezed in as much time together as was possible. We went to see a bluegrass band on Tuesday night with some friends, went out to an early breakfast together Wednesday morning at our favorite restaurant, and yesterday (Saturday) we planted our backyard garden. Baby Romaines! I am going to make some hanging signs for these old white chair backs that say “flowers” and “veggies.” In school related news, I registered for my Fall 2016 classes this week (already?!). I also had to plan my financial aid from now until the end of my program because of the way my schedule will work out. I will only take one class in my last semester (fall 2017) which means I won’t meet the minimum attendance requirement (part time/two classes)…
Ode to Brunch
Posted April 15, 2016 by Katie Caskey
I have just recently become a regular bruncher (forgive the pretentiousness, but I don’t know what else to call it). Breakfast has always been my favorite meal of the day, but the whole concept of meeting your pals on a weekend for some hearty breakfast food and acceptable morning alcohol (ie mimosas) isn’t something I encountered much in the Midwest. But since coming to Boston, my eyes have been opened to the great variety of possibilities that this mid-morning timeslot can hold. “What’s so great about brunch?” The food!!! Pancakes, eggs, hash, bagels, burritos, fruit…and the list goes on. And since you are technically combining two meals into one sitting, feel free to go wild with your ordering. Chocolate milk and coffee? French toast and bacon? SURE! The time slot. I consider myself a morning person, but even I can appreciate the gloriousness that is sleeping in past 8:00am. Brunch is the perfect excuse to sleep in and still feel like you’ve accomplished something with your day. The breakfast-y food tricks your brain into thinking…
Events, Elections, and Even More
Posted April 14, 2016 by Tara Pealer
This week was a little intense. I had completely new material to learn in tech class on Monday, two papers due Tuesday, four hours of volunteering at the career fair on Wednesday, and classes to pick out for my registration time on Friday morning. Between that, I had plans to come home to pick up my professional reimbursement check and plans to make with old friends I hadn’t seen in a while. This semester has been like that a lot…every other week. One week I have free time, I’m relaxed and I feel like I have time to breathe. The next week I’m so stressed out that I’m surprised that I can find time to sleep. But there’s plenty that’s exciting going on in SLIS right now. We’re about 25 days from the end of the semester, student elections just closed, and there are so many events happening in the next few weeks that it’s hard to keep track everything! Just in the last two weeks there were four or five different career focused events….
Accessing the Potential of Graduate Students
Posted April 9, 2016 by Amy Wilson
Yesterday I attended a conference that was jointly hosted by LLNE and ABLL at Northeastern University School of Law. The focus of the conference was “Access to Government Information,” but I noticed a second theme throughout the day: strong partnerships. The LLNE/ABLL spring conference was my first as a graduate student, and my strongest take-away from the day has to be the power of strong partnerships to produce successful results. The conference itself was obviously a collaboration of LLNE and ABLL, but this theme also came up consistently during the day’s events. I think that the most important step in forming a strong and healthy partnership is to recognize one’s own limits, and then to identify how the other party’s strengths can fill the gap. We heard an example of this strategy from Dan Jackson from the NuLawLab when he described his partnership with game designers and law librarians to build a game for self-representative litigants. Susan Drisko Zago also spoke about aligning law librarians with public librarians to serve rural populations in northern New Hampshire. Beryl Lipton and Pam Wilmot shared…
I Wish the Weather Would Make Up Its Mind
Posted April 8, 2016 by Katie Caskey
If you live anywhere in the Boston area, your Facebook feed has undoubtedly been filled with posts about the snow this last week. Either you are an incredulous new-comer to the unpredictability of New England springs or you are a hardened Bostonian, saddened by the reality of snow in April. But now, as I look outside, it’s pouring down rain. The snow is mostly melted, and I am seeing flowers and buds again. Later this week it’s supposed to be sunny and almost 60 degrees…before next weekend’s potential for snow again. However you feel about the weather, I think we can all agree that Boston needs to get it together and make up its mind! I could even get behind snow if I knew it was going to be around for a set amount of time and then be done! I just don’t like all this switching…it’s messing up my outfit planning, my reading selections, even my Panera ordering. After all, who wants to eat a salad when it’s 20 degrees outside? So, to help…
Homework Craze(d)
Posted April 7, 2016 by Tara Pealer
There’s been a little radio silence from me in the past few weeks, but it wasn’t intentional. It’s just that the semester decided to get ridiculously busy. In the past two weeks, I’ve learned javascript over the phone, shown my friends how to write javascript for an assignment, written 12 double spaced pages and four single spaced pages, taken a quiz, and all around tried to keep ahead on my homework. It’s been a very busy few weeks. However, Friday I was able to start to get ahead on my homework, which was a blessing and a half. April, for whatever reason, seems to be a little less crazy, though there’s still a lot to do. For 403, besides the third assignment and the final 25 page paper, I signed up as part of an extra credit Usability team. For 453, I finished my tweets and usage statistics assignment early but still have the final policy to write and put together. 488 still has a paper, the final webpage, some graphics work and a relational database assignment to get started on. Oh, and Camp NaNoWriMo…
Beating The Bug
Posted April 2, 2016 by Amy Wilson
Most of my week was unfortunately consumed by a stomach bug, and I didn’t make it back to work until Thursday morning. Is there anything more frustrating than wasting PTO to be sick? I spent many hours on the couch and felt so miserable that I couldn’t even get ahead on homework. Instead, I watched/dozed through a lot of Jane Austen movies, including Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Becoming Jane, and Mansfield Park. I also got really sick of toast and applesauce. By Wednesday, when I still wasn’t well again, I was starting to freak out because I had presentations in both my classes this week; Wednesday was my individual presentation on a legal research database, and Thursday was a group presentation on reference in special libraries. Luckily I’m not a procrastinator so all my research/design was done, but I knew that there was no way I could make it to campus on Wednesday night.Google to the Rescue: Channeling my inner Rob, I started searching for technological solutions. I quickly found a Chrome plugin called Snagit that would…
Playing the Waiting Game
Posted April 1, 2016 by Katie Caskey
I have good news and bad news. The (very very) good news is that I am graduating in less than 7 weeks! Done! Finished with school! And while I have absolutely loved my time at Simmons, and in academia in general, I am very ready to begin the next (paper- and homework-free) season of life…which brings me to the bad news. As I am learning, this next season may be aptly titled “The Waiting Game.” I’ve been applying to internships and job positions since late January, and so far, no nibbles. The hardest part is that with the company I’m applying to, I can track my application progress on their website. So while I can see that my application is being considered, I have no way of knowing how long that might last or how serious that consideration is. So, I’m having to re-learn the art of patience that was drilled into me by my kindergarten teacher. This is enough to drive a planner like me crazy, by the way. So I’ve decided that I’m…
Food Advertisements
Posted March 28, 2016 by Jill Silverberg
When you are writing a thesis about food, it is almost inevitable that you are going to encounter some pretty interesting examples of food culture. Thus far in my study of American food culture from the 1950s to the early 1990s, I’ve encountered fan letters to Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer-Becker the mother-daughter duo behind the Joy of Cooking. Their cookbooks promote a vast array of recipes that utilize ingredients that range from diced vegetables to box Jell-o mixed. By far my favorite thing that I’ve had to analyze in the name of academia is food advertisements from magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, and Better Homes & Gardens from the 1950s. These advertisements, which are very much products of their time, offer insight into consumer and food trends from the decade. For my paper, I am analyzing these advertisements as a means of understanding how the food and consumer industry promoted the gendering of the kitchen and the position of the home cook. The following advertisements were found within magazines that are a part of Johnson and Wales Culinary…
Very Special Libraries
Posted March 19, 2016 by Amy Wilson
Last week, while most of Simmons was on spring break, I was on campus every day from 9am until about 3pm. I took the week off of work in order to complete a 5-day, 3-credit course with SLIS legend, Jim Matarazzo. Jim has worked in corporate libraries for decades, and he is the original social networker. I’m pretty sure you could ask about any major company and he will tell you the history of their corporate library and name two contacts there. This class was heavily career focused, extremely practical… and wicked fun! Our assignments for the week included two papers and two (group) presentations. We looked at a set of corporate libraries that had closed and another set that were “successful,” then evaluated how corporate libraries can survive and thrive. We also each summarized a chapter from the textbook (which Jim co-authored). My favorite day of the week was Tuesday, when we did our site visits. We started at the New England School of Law, whose library has an impressive reference staff and a very cozy study space….