Phew.

Weeeeeeeell, as expected, it only took a couple of days for the first mild panic attack to set in. I decided tonight that I was going to make my first real attempt at productivity and jump headfirst into the discussion boards for LIS 500, and oh lordy did I feel like a fish out of water.

I think the root of my problem lies in the fact that thus far, I've tried to do everything digitally to cut down on the reams of paper I'd otherwise be going through. Reading the PDFs online and taking notes via Microsoft Word, as it turns out, just doesn't have the same impact as the studying and review I did all through undergrad, because I couldn't turn to the articles while brainstorming discussion question answers. I hadn't marked them up with underlining and highlighting like I normally do, so when searching for relevant points, I got kinda lost. And trying to decipher the paragraph long comments people kept leaving definitely didn't help the confusion, so I wound up having my first real "What in holy hell have I gotten myself into?" moment. I started feeling a little better after sitting back and taking a few deep breaths, and put together a pretty awesome Introductory Powerpoint for LIS 510 (albeit slightly over the 5 minute limit), then when I decided to upload it to Screencast via Camtasia Relay, I find that Screencast has randomly crashed. *insert hyperventilating here*

At this point in the evening, I'm tired, I'm grumpy, I'm confused, and I'm really hoping a good night's sleep will help clear my head. I may have to rethink my strategy a bit when it comes to how I'll be doing my reading from now on. We've been told time and time again that this quarter will be the hardest, since we'll have to readjust our way of thinking and doing things quite a bit, and I certainly hope that's true. If not, I'm just going to have to suck it up and step it up. Can't take over the library world with online stage fright, right?

But for now, sleep sounds pretty great.

P.S. I've been doing laundry all evening, and I just noticed for the first time that there's a setting on our dryer for "Optimum Dry". But for whatever reason, there's an option right above it for "More Dry". Why is that there? Wouldn't "Optimum Dry" be the optimum option? I am confused.

And now the real work starts...

Today was, sadly enough, the last day of my iSchool orientation. These have easily been four of the most intense days of my entire life, and while I'm really sad to have to leave the happy little library bubble I've been in this whole time and return to the outside world, at the same time I'm pretty relieved that it's over, because that means we can finally get to work. Our sessions this morning were, for me anyway, by far the most intense of the entire orientation, which I definitely wasn't expecting. The rest of our sessions have covered everything from the tech tools we'll be using throughout our program (I'll do a post on them all later...right now I'm just trying to figure out how the hell to actually use them) to managing group work in an online setting, but today, the focus was on our futures.

            

At the culmination of our program, we will be required to complete what is called a Culminating Experience (CE). Going into orientation, I knew very little about these except that we'd have a few types of projects to choose from, and that if at first we don't succeed, we get to try try again until we do. We've got four different types of projects to choose from, and I'll give a breakdown of each along with my initial (and slightly overwhelmed) thoughts on them:

             

Option #1: Professional Portfolio

              

Of our four CE options, building a Professional Portfolio seems to be both the easiest option, but also the most time consuming, and most requiring of significant forethought. In essence, our professional portfolios will be like a resume on crack - a digital record and presentation of everything we've done and accomplished in the field of library science, both within our program and outside as well. These digital exhibitions will help showcase our work, skills, and overall potential to future employers, and as an added plus, they’ll also net us three credits and fulfill the CE requirement. In order to do a decent job with these, we’ll be creating and utilizing a “Digital Repository”, which will serve to hold all kinds of useful artifacts from every stage of our grad school experience in an online storage space that we can access anytime. I’m definitely going to be starting mine up within the next couple days, since class is officially starting up next week.

              

My immediate reaction to listening to Marie talk about the portfolios was excitement. I’m taking a Website Design elective this quarter, and ideally, even if I don’t wind up choosing this to fulfill my CE requirement, I’d like to design and build a portfolio from scratch. It'd be insanely useful in my future job-hunting to be able to tack on a URL to any resume, cover letter, or business card I'll be handing out (and I'm suuuure there will be resumes aplenty that get sent out into the void before I find something that works best for me), and even though it'll be a lot of work to develop a portfolio in my own time in addition to my official CE choice, I think I'm up for it!

               

Option #2: Thesis

            

Ahhh the thesis. A beast I managed to successfully avoid in undergrad, despite being an English Lit major (still not quite sure how that happened). As far as I could tell from the presentation, this wouldn't be all that different from a typical undergrad thesis, save the fact that as a Master's thesis, it'd be of a higher caliber and much more likely to get published. Student-directed research, student-written scholarly paper, and the definite CE priority for anyone looking towards a future PhD.

             

It's been a goal of mine for a while to eventually pursue a doctorate in whatever field I decided to pursue career-wise, but I was definitely taken aback when Joe Janes (our program chair) flat out warned us away from it if we aren't planning on focusing our career on research and teaching. I'd always considered a doctorate as a way of maxing out in our field, but from what we were told today, I don't think it's something I should pursue, since it'd put me on a drastically different path from where I'd like to head. No thesis for me!

               

Option #3: Research Project

                

Collaborating with a faculty member or two on their independent research, something I'd been hoping to be able to do, has apparently been recently declared CE-worthy. Being part of a faculty-directed research team, and potentially being able to aid the prof in publishing, definitely holds some appeal for me, but I’m not sure I’d like this to be the end all and be all of my time in the iSchool. Plus, in order to collaborate on something, I’d have to be really damn sure I’m interested in whatever research was going on, and there's no guarantee right now that any of the profs will be engaging in research that will be interesting enough for me personally to prompt me to want to jump in headfirst. This is definitely an option, but it doesn't top my list. Which brings me to...

                   

Option #4: Capstone Project

            

Imagine you have an information idea. It could be anything from improving the information gathering/storage/retrieval process of a business to establishing a teen outreach program in your local library. Now imagine proposing it to that business/library/organization and with their help, and that of the iSchool, being able to implement that idea and watch its effect on the organization.

                 

Going into undergrad, I had no illusions that my academic work, unless it was exceptional beyond all belief (it definitely wasn't), would be most relevant to my own personal development, and not necessarily to the community at large. This CE option holds the most initial draw for me because it would allow me to begin to leave my footprint in not just my school community, but in the field I've chosen to pursue, which is something I've never really had the opportunity (or drive) to accomplish before. My goals are big, I'll admit that freely, and they aren't going to be easy by any means to achieve. For all I know, I may be seduced by a different area of library and information science than what I've initially pointed myself towards. But despite all that, I see this Capstone as a real opportunity to make my first mark in the library world, even though I had to mentally slap myself for feeling compelled to brainstorm Capstone ideas four days into orientation. I'm slightly crazy, if you all hadn't figured that out already. :)

                  

After these culminating project options were all outlined to us, we sat through another thirty-minute talk on Directed Fieldwork, and our options for that area of our degrees, but by the time DFW popped up, my mind was already completely engrossed in daydreaming about how I'm going to spend the latter half of my degree pursuit. A definite fault/virtue of mine is that I'm very future-oriented - I tend to focus my energies and excitement more on what's to come than what I've experienced in the past and what's around me at the moment. The thing that alternately excites and terrifies me about listening to our options for Culminating Experiences is this feeling that the iSchool, more than anyone or anything else in my life up to this point, is going to equip me with the skills and resources to take over the world. This is the real deal, people. It isn't something to just float through, like undergrad (yeah, don't kid yourselves...we all skated through and managed to pop out with a degree that in most cases just isn't useful or applicable to what we're doing right now). Being made to realize all of this is why today, of all four amazing days of orientation, was by far the most intense and overwhelming, yet at the same time, the most inspiring and validating.

                   

Hokay. I am exhausted. It felt really good to get all this out of my head, but it's definitely time to go do something brainless for a while (Netflix ho!).

Orientation Schmorientation

Good evening everyone, and welcome to my latest (and hopefully least unsuccessful) attempt at a sexy new blog! I just finished Day Two of my iSchool orientation, and it's already becoming apparent that I'm going to need a place besides official class forums to alternately geek out about how unbelievably cool my plunge into library and info science has been and will be, and freak out about the stress and frustrations that I'm sure will plague me along the way. Alors, une blog!

Days One and Two have been increasingly awesome, and every bit as exciting as I'd hoped they'd be. For those of you that know me, and have known me for longer than, oh, a year or so, you know that I have the tendency to retreat into crippling shyness when I'm confronted with a big group of people I don't know. A hold-over from my high school days that I'm doing my damnedest to get rid of with a pretty high success rate so far. It took a while for us all to stumble through the obligatory get-to-know-you phase of the orientation, but one impromptu lunch group formation and one spontaneous coffee/sit outside and chat session later, I started feeling a lot more comfortable and in my element. Undergrad orientation brought together a truly mixed bag of people who all wound up going their separate ways academically after a couple semesters, but this. This is different. Everyone that's here is here because we share similar passions and goals for our lives, and I still can't get over how foreign yet incredible it feels to be among all my fellow librarians-to-be.

That being said, the actual orientation part of orientation has pretty much done nothing but kick my ass since I've started. You know that feeling you get when you suddenly commit to running a marathon, but you haven't exercised beyond an occasional round of Wii Bowl for the past two years? I haven't used my brain in any sort of academic way since I graduated from Linfield almost two years ago, and even though my incomprehension of a big chunk of our assigned readings kind of tipped me off to the fact that Yes, Katie, you're actually going to have to work for this one...go figure, sweetheart, it's still a bit of a shock to sit through a session and come out realizing you actually don't known a damn thing about the field you've chosen to pursue as a career. It's intimidating, to say the least.

I'll probably start posting more about the content of what I'll be doing later, but for now, a quick summary of my class load:

LIS 500 - The Life Cycle of Information

This is the class I know the most about thus far, which is probably because of the shitload of readings and lecture-watching we've had assigned to us over the past three weeks. Seven "modules" that cover everything from defining information to conceptual models and relational databases form the backbone of the class, and as we all found out (to our horror) during orientation, this class is accelerated, meaning our culminating project is due not at the end of the quarter, but October 17th. A little over three weeks from now. *hyperventilates*

LIS 510 - Information Behavior

I know next to nothing about this class so far, but what I do know, I like a lot. The instructor for this one narrated a lecture for LIS 500 on metadata that I found worthy of a geek-out session, and the first article our prof encouraged us to take a look at is titled "New Shit Has Come To Light: Information Seeking Behavior in The Big Lebowski." It's times like these that I feel like I've finally found my people.

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(The kitten says hello.)

INFX 503 - Website Design for Information Professionals

Website design has always been of interest to me, but until now I've been too intimidated/lazy to pursue it seriously. HTML knowledge and familiarity with the tools and tricks required to create and maintain a website or database is an insanely marketable skill in today's job market, so when I saw this pop up as a tech elective, I figured I might as well give it a go. I'm anticipating many nights of cussing out my computer, but hopefully at the end of it all, I'll be slightly less clueless as to how a website is born and kept up to date.

C'est tout pour la nuit, mes amis! Time to cook some dinner (i.e. pour a bowl of cereal and pray my milk hasn't gone bad).