#shelfindulgence

[traceymhawk]

Thank you, @bpet30 ! Love the #shelfindulgence book club you created! #bookclub #christmas #holidays #december #december2020 #friendship #💙 https://www.instagram.com/p/CIwa6Z8pnbRLildQhIR8_O_UrojO5kuFm-z7BM0/?igshid=1reg4akd9byvz

[prince-of-illusions]

Celebrating thesis being done with some nice iced tea <3 #shelfindulgence #tea #icedtea #florida (at Shelf Indulgence Used Book Boutique)

[shelf--indulgence]

Coping with four classes

Since the generic understanding of graduate school also comes with the understanding that three or less classes is considered sane, I don't know how the brilliant idea of taking more than the sane-maximum came from. 

Here's how I'm feeling: Taking four classes in addition to working 27 hours a week isn't the worst thing I've ever done. I still feel like I have the free time I love so much, and I'm usually not too stressed about what I'm doing in school. The biggest issue this semester has come from my Organization of Information class, which got off to a rough start since my textbooks were stolen from my doorstep and I wasn't able to adequately keep up with the reading. Still, all of my grades are in the "A" range and I 100% believe this is due to my ridiculous need to plan things out.

Let me introduce you to my system: Agendas and calenders - everywhere. I have a combined daily and monthly agenda that I carry with me everywhere, even when I go out to bars or events with my friends. If this book is not on me, it is either in my car or at home while I take notes on my phone when needed. I spend a few hours at different points in the semester to look back over my syllabi and course calender to make sure that I have all my dates written in correctly in the daily and monthly sections. I then go back in and write down the days that I am going to dedicate to working on each assignment before they are due so that I don't get caught off guard or get stuck doing work at the last minute. 

I then go ahead and fill in a monthly calender that I have hung by my desk and the dry-erase calender in my kitchen with the same information - due dates and "work dates," plus anything like doctors appointments, lectures or events I'd like to attend. Being surrounding by scheduled assignments has helped me maintain a straight-A streak since I started school back up. I'd like to mention that this system didn't exist in undergrad when I was taking classes that I was arguably better/more interested in, and I think my grades back then showed it.

There's something nice about having my week planned so that I spent 0.5-2 hours on certain days (note: not every day) doing work and having the rest of my time to read or peruse the internet.

Try it out if you may - I'm still working on getting my boyfriend, a first year in medical school, to try micromanaging his own work to see if that helps with his stress levels. I think it will, but he, and a lot of other people, think it takes too much time and is a stressful activity in itself. Let me know what y'all think :)

[shelf--indulgence]

MARC Format Terror

Semester 1: Accidentally stumble across MARC format and have an existential breakdown from not understanding what I'm looking at.

Semester 2: Take class specifically reviewing MARC formatting and have an existential breakdown from not understanding what I'm looking at.

Does anyone have any links to helpful breakdowns of MARC that a 5 year old could understand?

[shelf--indulgence]

New city blues

This is probably just a fact of life I missed out on - but moving isn't very fun. Moving from Tallahassee to Tampa made me feel like I was being exiled out of my home just so I could attend a new school and start the hunt for a new job. All of my closest friends had moved to other states or countries, and I had just finished spending the summer alone in despair after my roommate/best friend moved out early to go work in New York. Figuring out my grand plans for making the journey down to the middle of the state took months of stress, and I finally settled in after two days of feverish unpacking and decorating. But all this left me with a month of no school and no work. Since I'm an introvert in a new city, this meant a month of laying on my couch with my dog. It's been about seven months now and a bit has changed. I say a bit because the list of life changes is not a huge one. I began work at a local college as a tutor and have been floundering to adjust to a new subject of study. Making friends has been one of the most difficult thing, so developing a social life is still a work in progress that will be going on for quite some time. Tallahassee vs Tampa is not a comparison that can easily be made, but hopefully things will settle soon enough and Tampa-love can start replacing a little bit of my Tallahassee-woes soon enough.

[shelf--indulgence]

Grades

Graduate school always seemed quite lofty to me. As an undergraduate in Literature, all of the grad students I encountered looked a few steps away from a stress-induced heart attack. The late nights of reading and grading, and the long weekends of writing and more reading appeared as dark stains underneath their eyes as they gathered in halls to talk about their strategy for survival. Even though I was switching focuses and fields of studies, I started my program with apprehension - how much of a social life would I have? Would this finally be level I cap out at? Will it be too much? Much of my surprise, I ended my first semester with a grad school experience full of free afternoons and weekends to spend as I pleased. This is not to say that the classes weren't totally different from what I previously experienced, or that I didn't face my share of existential breakdowns. But a semester of all A's? I can't explain how suspicious I was. Given the fact that I had never gotten straight A's until this point, I had to reevaluate my life. Had I finally honed my study and time management skills? The vast amount of lists and calendars I had scattered around my home said yes. Am I a secret LIS genius? That's questionable. Was the program too easy? First semester judgment couldn't answer this question, along with the dozen of other concerns I had. In cases like this, hard work does pay off and it's possible that the seclusion from "college life" did make a difference in my achievements. For now I can only continue doing what I was doing and try not to feel embarrassed when I visit home and see my grades printed and framed in my mom's bedroom.

[shelf--indulgence]

Lit to LIS

Reflection time: As my second semester gets into full swing her wit USF, I realized with great sadness that this semester marks a full year since I graduated from FSU. This anniversary marks a huge shift in my life, as I officially ended my exclusive relationship with literature and philosophy and began my engagement with library and information sciences. I wanted to write a post on how this shift did not come easy and how, like with all choices, it came with a bit of unease and buyers remorse. It's difficult to explain how deeply literature was engrained in my life, as my mother was an English teacher in Romania and raised me to read far ahead of my age. A memory is my 4th grade teacher commenting on a book I was reading having no pictures, and that I shouldn't be reading it. As school continued, I focused my hard work and joy on English and other reading/writing related classes. Math was a struggle, so I'm not sure how much of a choice I had anyway. Each class that I took at FSU was a complete joy - a class specifically on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Yes, please, even if it means reading one massive book per week on top of my other class readings. I made plans to pursue a phd in literature and faced the reality of the job market in English. One quick conversation that occurred at an award dinner for my roommate, which I attended purely for the free food, led to a massive change, and a few months later I was attending USF for library and information science. Before starting classes, I was fairly excited to learn new, applicable skills - a refreshing experience after 4 years of reading, discussions and debates. Even though I am not the strongest at learning computer skills, I felt like my future classes would be a welcome challenge. Once my first semester began, the "buyers remorse" set in. I missed the readings and discussions. I missed the in-person interaction and the feel of attending college on a regular basis. That community was missing and I felt the brunt of that change during the first few weeks. It honestly wasn't until the end of my first semester that a fairly obvious realization hit me: I could still continue to do all the things I enjoyed from the Literature programs while working on my LIS degree. This meant that I could still pursue my personal pleasures and adopt a more appreciative outlook on my LIS studies, So, in a way, this long winded post is to remind myself (and any readers) that evolution and change are not things that can happen overnight or without any consequences. Even changes for the better can be a cause of chaos - but the changes are all worthwhile in the end.

[shelf--indulgence]

Accomplishments-

Today is the last day my writing center is open for students to come in and get help with whatever questions they may have. Today has also been a day of accomplishments, which may be premature to say since it's only 11am as I write this. Waking up at 6am is an accomplishment on it's own, and work has been mostly empty with the exception of a few students coming in to make last minute changes to their papers on the computers that are kept in the center. One student, however, came in and asked for a quick review of her paper. She was extremely soft spoken but nice, and I could immediately tell it'd be a good session (and one where my work-personality, which is full of weird explanations and excitement, wouldn't scare her off). She wanted to discuss the overall format of her paper, which turned into a discussion of MLA formatting and the expectations that come with college paper writing. This is one of the more difficult things to teach, I find, because of the 7,000 rules and weird loopholes that happen with citations. This girl got it though, wrote her own notes and then asked the perfect questions ("Does the citation go at the end of your thought? Does it go before or after the period?"). It was wonderful, especially because teaching is so important to LIS and tutoring sessions like this really make me feel like I'm not a total hack. Another thing that happened was that I made a non-school related flyer that I'm quite proud of. The bosses requested that we look through the resources that the center has available to students and make new ones, or make changes to old ones, so everyone's needs are met. After seeing the continual beating that semicolons go through in 8/10 papers that I see ("I like using them instead of commas! They look better!"), I decided to make a sheet that explained the rules for semicolon use that hopefully won't put students to sleep. I noticed that every time I give a student a take-home sheet that's a list of rules, I get the distinct feeling that this sheet will end up as shredded paper in a hamster cage. Sometimes, I even get confirmation of the sad ending these sheets meet. The hope is that, if the students don't get a huge list that's written in academic language that they maybe don't understand, then the information may actually be implemented. I have over ten more sheets to make over the next week, and hopefully some Jing presentations to help show students how to use the library website, databases and all of those nice things. This can only happen if my computer gets returned back from Apple, since right now I'm only able to work on an iPad. As a side note - the Pages app is quite nice. 😻 So - I hope that this feeling and productivity lasts.