Yay for Free Books!!!
Posted February 26, 2016 by Katie Caskey
I will be the first one to admit that grad school is tough! There are papers to write, internships to complete, and that’s to say nothing of the one or two (or three) part-time jobs one has to work just to afford food and heat! But, you all know that already, so I’m not going to scare you/bore you with the woes of grad school. Instead, I want to take this time to highlight my absolute FAVORITE perk I’ve encountered in my time as a children’s lit. grad student at Simmons…FREE BOOKS!!!!!! Every year the children’s literature department holds their free book giveaway for all the students in the program. Many of the professors in the program are also book reviewers, so our department is sent many review and advance copies of newly-published or about-to-be-published books. As the year goes on the collection grows, filling the shelves in the book nook until there just isn’t room for anymore. It is then we all receive the much-anticipated invitation to come live out a book-lover’s dream. Each…
Nothing Much
Posted February 25, 2016 by Tara Pealer
I haven’t done anything blog worthy this week. My friend and I took her cat to a free vet clinic for a check-up, I went to school and work, and I paid all of my bills. Yesterday I did laundry. No one wants to hear, read, or talk about those things. I don’t even feel like writing about them. The end of the week looks exciting, though. My friends and I will be spending Friday binge watching all of Fuller House and probably not getting completely drunk. I’ll probably be going to the MFA to see the new acquisition of Frida Kahlo. I might do some cleaning to make my apartment presentable. I probably won’t buy more than two cups of the Smoked Butterscotch Latte (soy milk, no whip) from Starbucks. This is all in the future, however. Which, honestly, leaves me with absolutely nothing to talk about. There was a lunch event with a professor who talked about ways in which the LIS field has limited its discourse through language choice, teaching method, and…
Cookbooks
Posted February 21, 2016 by Jill Silverberg
Looking out the window from my desk at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science, I can’t help but think about how, exactly one year ago, the city of Boston was drowning under piles of snow. While I am a big fan of snow and snow days, I have to admit that I am rather relieved that this year, the weather has decided to play nicely. Considering that I have a thesis to write, research to do, an internship to complete, and heat bills to pay, I am quite content with having 50+ degree days in February. And how exactly is that thesis coming along? Well I can tell you that it is coming along. This evening I will be submitting my outline to my advisor which I have to admit, is equal parts exciting and terrifying. I treat my outlines like architectural blueprints. Having outlined the overall structure of my paper enables me to focus on each section at a time. Since an average thesis runs about 60-80 pages, having something like an outline is definitely…
Making a Statement
Posted February 20, 2016 by Amy Wilson
This month, I have prioritized getting scholarship applications out for next year. I had deadlines of March 1 for the American Library Association and April 1 for the Association of American Law Libraries. I decided to do it all at once because I know that I am only going to get busier from here. Below, I am posting an abridged version of the essay that I submitted to AALL. That essay was allowed to be longer because they also wanted to know about my financial status. The version that I submitted to the ALA was limited to less than 300 words. Editing it down was great practice for an assignment that I had this week in my reference course. We had to create an “annotation” for a print reference source; I chose “The Dictionary of Imaginary Places” and had a lot of fun writing it (stay tuned next week for that)! Anyway, here is my personal statement: When I was an undergraduate, the most influential classroom of my education was a small, sunny office near the reference section of…
Sick Day: A Photo Journal
Posted February 19, 2016 by Katie Caskey
Yesterday I woke up and immediately knew my time had come. Yes, I had finally caught the dreaded 24-hour flu bug. I so rarely get sick, it came as a bit of a surprise, but regardless of how I felt about it there was no denying…I was sick! I’ll spare you the details of what “sick” meant in my case, but I will tell you that getting up off the couch to take a shower at one point almost killed me. So, I hunkered down and made the best of a nasty day. Usually when I feel like this, I love to be a home with my mom, snuggling on the couch and eating her miracle-working scrambled eggs. But since my mom is all the way back in Minnesota, I had to fend for myself this time. Here is my magic formula for self-healing as a graduate student… A big comfy couch, preferably with cozy blankets and pillows A laptop computer to fend off boredom And what good is a laptop without your favorite binge-worthy…
I went to Harry Potter world
Posted February 18, 2016 by Tara Pealer
Okay, I didn’t really. I went to Harry Potter’s World at Beatley Library. A little bit closer to home and a lot less expensive. Libraries are a great place for free events. What is Harry Potter’s World at Beatley Library, you might be asking? Well, Harry Potter’s World is a travelling event put on at libraries across the nation by the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine. It combines elements of the world of Harry Potter, from Fantastic Beasts to Herbology, with a real world perspective of the history of science concerning those elements. It compares Harry’s experience with something like Immortality with the historical search and medical science behind the same topic. Yesterday the exhibit opened with an event involving the Sorting Hat, Wand Making, S.P.E.W (Society for Promotion of Elfish Welfare) and, of course, Dumbledore. I was sorted, thankfully, into Hufflepuff, and collected free items from the event, including a Hufflepuff pin, a Hogwarts pin, a S.P.E.W pin, and a fake tattoo of the spell ‘Riddikulus!’ The wand making station followed…
The Legend of the Famously Curious Monkey
Posted February 12, 2016 by Katie Caskey
In honor of this year’s Chinese zodiac animal, I would like to tell you all a story about what is, perhaps, the world’s most famous literary monkey…Curious George. I preface this post with the acknowledgement of the story’s source, Anita Silvey. Anita is a professor of Children’s Literature here at Simmons. She has worked for many years in the publishing industry, served as the editor of The Horn Book review journal, and has published a book (and a blog) called Anita Silvey’s Children’s Book-A-Day Almanac, in which she highlights a different children’s book for each day of the calendar. Because of her many years in the industry, she is full of remarkable behind-the-scenes stories of some of our favorite books’ publishing histories. When I took her class on Publishing I got the chance to spend an entire semester listening to her wonderful tales. Here is one of my favorites… Hans Rey, creator of our favorite mischievous monkey, and his wife Margret were living in Paris in 1941 during World War II. Just three days before…
Advice from the Advisor in Residence
Posted February 11, 2016 by Tara Pealer
Simmons LIS is really lucky to have an amazing support staff working in the dean’s office to make the best of opportunities for student looking for career advice. Currently, the student support staff is working to arrange the career fair and other events to assist students, like myself, in improving their resumes and interview skills to appeal to today’s job market. One of these opportunities is meeting with the Advisor in Residence, Amy Ryan. Amy Ryan was the first female president of the BPL, and, among many other accomplishments, graciously volunteers her time to offer advice on resume, skill building, networking, and interviewing to SLIS students. She has meeting times set up for individual meetings, holds group lunch meetings to discuss the job market and other LIS topics, and actively engages with the students to help them network and find positions. Have I mentioned that one of my favorite things about Simmons is how career focused their program is? Long story short, I signed up for a meeting with Amy Ryan for Thursday to ask…
How I Spent SuperBowl 50
Posted February 8, 2016 by Jill Silverberg
I want to preface that I am not a big football fan. I enjoy watching a game every now and then but only casually. I barely know any rules associated to the game; I can only name like three players; and half of the time, I forget which team is which. Like I said, I am not a football person. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t find ways to enjoy myself when I watch a football game. This year, my entire apartment decided to do something special for the Super Bowl. Last year, our first year living together, three of us were extremely sick and I spent the majority of the game hallucinating from the flu. So, to celebrate 50 years of Super Bowl fun and not being sick, we decided to put together a massive Bingo game. Pretty impressive huh? We got into the tradition of making Bingo boards during the last year’s baseball season. Since then, we make a board for every sport game we watch. Some times it works better than others but it’s…
This week in 3D printing adventures…
Posted February 6, 2016 by Amy Wilson
Last Tuesday, I hosted a lunch event at my law firm as part of our “Innovation TED Talk Series.” I’m on my Information Services department’s Innovation Board, and one of our most successful “ideas” has been this series of lunchtime sessions, where we view a TED talk and then discuss it as a group. Even though we have the capability to have meetings with multiple cities, we have kept this at the local office level because it has been very nice to just have a discussion with people that you might cross paths with in the kitchen but never really have an opportunity to talk with. It’s also a venue for people to brainstorm and share ideas generally. After the first talk, I also campaigned to have these kind of events count toward our department-wide annually required professional development training. This quarter, our talk was “Where Good Ideas Come From,” a 2010 presentation by Steven Johnson that examines what kinds of spaces and environments lead to innovation (if you have 18 minutes, it is worth…