I am just gleeful about the day I had today, and heaven knows there isn’t enough happiness in the blogsphere, so I am just going to dish about it all, and y’all will just have to wait for the usual angsty meditative stuff. (I am also bloody exhausted—very long day!—so that may manifest as weirder syntax than usual.)
I took my usual bus to campus, which got me there pretty goldarn early. By pure chance, I sat next to someone who’s in my web-based collections course—someone who actually buttonholed the professor teaching it and started to ask questions. So I got to listen in on that, and any minor reservations I had about the course have completely disappeared. She’s taught it, like, fifteen times as a distance-ed class, and she obviously knows what she’s about.
We got a fairly standard introductory spiel to start out the day—here is the program design, here are the professors, here are some announcements, all that necessary stuff.
Then we did the inevitable “People Bingo” mixer. I found myself in great demand, being the only person in the room who plays games by computer. (Strictly speaking, the square was for “computer games,” which I don’t really play, but I figure play-by-email RPGs are close enough.) Plus fitting in to, like, half the other spaces on the board—speaking Spanish, having more than one cat, doing web-page design, having taken trips to Europe, all that stuff. As hokey as the setup was, it worked—people really did just up and start talking to each other. Which, I think in my more-or-less arrogant fashion, is a function of the calibre of people who make their various and sundry ways into library school.
People. Man. I met such cool people today. That was the best part.
We went to lunch with “mentors” in their second year of the program. Y’all will be amused to learn that I drifted into the parents group, partly because I’d already met (and liked) half the people in it, partly because one of its mentors was also a roleplayer. One of my fellow newbies works just down the street, so I offered my house as a place to crash, hang out, do homework, park the kid if needed, whatever.
At lunch we got all the really good dirt about the professors, which I have sworn my solemn oath not to reveal, so… I’ll just say that the complaints struck me as fairly minor and curable for the most part. And one of our mentors, bless him for a brilliant and understanding man, brought copies of all his course syllabi for our perusal.
After lunch we met with our various advisers—I’m still torn on whether I should find a new one, but I have a couple prospects in mind, so I’m going to hang loose for a semester or so and see what happens. I did enjoy the tips on getting along with the departmental recordskeeper, a woman of pronounced character.
Tours of the SLIS library and computer lab followed. You may be jealous if you like—SLIS has the best damn views of Lake Mendota on campus. Just gorgeous. And now I know where all the good info-sci periodicals are hiding. I went ahead and donated my copy of the black-and-blue brick The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing to the SLIS library, figuring they could make good use of it—it’s an expensive book, and (aside from a few pages at the end of Chapter 8 that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on—I should know, I wrote ’em) a good and useful book.
The last event before dinner was a panel of alumni talking about their highly varied jobs (from a children’s bookmobile manager to a law librarian, and lots of stuff in between). What shone out of every single one of them was how content they are with where they’ve landed—not that life is perfect, not that they’ll never move on, but they’re clearly happy with what they do, and that’s such a wonderful thing to see.
And then we got to chow down on lasagna, exchange a few words with some of the folks we met, and go home to collapse. Well, most of them got to collapse. I had to finish up my slideshow for tomorrow, which I have now done, and while I was at it I thought I’d blog my super-happy day.
I walked in thinking “I can’t believe I’m a student again. I’m a student again? Yee-bloody-ikes, how am I going to manage being a student again?”
And I walked out with a spring in my step, thinking, “Hey! I’m a student again! W00t!”
Which is what a good orientation ought to do, I think. Heaven knows the Department from Hell could take lessons—and that’s really all the snark I have in me at the moment, so I am going to giggle a bit out of sheer exuberant delight and go over my slides one more time and get ready for bed.
