"There's good money to be made in science librarianship." 'Stupid rich scientists....'
At pretty much every stage of the educational process, I can distinctly recall being sat down and told that the next stage was going to be vastly different and many times more difficult. Elementary and middle school paled in comparison to junior high, junior high school didn't have anything on high school, college was a whole different world than high school, and so on. I'm willing to bet that even if I don't specifically recall it, someone back in Ms. Nielsen's kindergarten class was whispering in hushed tones about how first grade was a whole new enchilada. "Full days and no naptimes...pass it on...."
That said, I'm understandably hesitant to think that grad school will prove very different from undergraduate work -- after the last three or four bouts of warnings and advice, I've grown fairly impervious to such suggestions. Attending orientation last weekend helped cement that notion as I sat through the same shtick I've sat through at Normandale and the U of M. Here's how to check your e-mail, here's how to use the college's online gateway, here's a free pencil. Having a bonafide nun from the campus ministry lead everyone in prayer and being one of maybe ten present males (and one of only three in my entering class of 45) was a new development, but otherwise it was standard operating procedure.
Oh, and the continental breakfast was better than previous orientation-related breakfasts, but since I'm paying about twice as much per credit now as I once was I would certainly hope it would be. At this level of the educational realm, I feel that a solid ham-and-cheese frittata is to be expected.
I printed off my syllabi a day or two ago and was a bit surprised at the seemingly light workload. A lot of it looks like research projects and problem solving exercises; there's very few research-something-and-write-a-big-paper sort of assignments. I believe one of the finals is a take-home essay of (gasp!) eight to ten pages. Perhaps this stuff will prove trickier than meets the eye -- these are entry-level classes for the program, after all. Presumably, like any good graduate program, I'll soon start getting worked to death before getting spit out the other end a shattered and broken man.
We shall see how things go. Class starts next week -- I'll be over on campus Wednesday and Thursday nights from 6PM to 9PM. The Commute™, one of the big things I was worrying about, has turned out to actually be pretty decent. I can take an express bus from a block away from my office that gets me to St. Kate's in 25 minutes flat. For the return trip, I can take a relay of a bus (74) to the light rail to a bus (2) that gets me two blocks away from home in slightly under an hour. All said, that's not a bad time for taking public transit across the city and into another. And, at long last, I'll have an excuse to become a regular light-rail rider. While I was taking the train to orientation, I read a newspaper on the train and everything -- just like a big city captain of industry!
Besides all matters educational, work has continued to be entirely too pleasant. We hired a new soul to handle my previous work with answering the phone and sending correspondence. She's a cool character with a fine balance of cynicism and likeability who tolerates my barbs about her age ("Well if this job doesn't work out, you can always go back to riveting World War 2 bombers.") and returns them in kind ("Now this show is TV-14, so be sure to watch it with Elise.").
Since she took some of the burden off my shoulders, I've been free to pursue various technological projects that I won't describe in great detail. To be quite honest, even if I did, it would likely either make little to no sense or sound immensely boring. I think that IT folks need some sort of buddy program so that they can actually describe what they do on a given day to an audience that understands the quiet feeling of victory that comes with rewiring an unkempt server cage or creating a new spreadsheet showing each given DNS entry and how its IP address changes from the server to the load balancer to the firewall. Rest assured, it gladdens me.
That said, I'm understandably hesitant to think that grad school will prove very different from undergraduate work -- after the last three or four bouts of warnings and advice, I've grown fairly impervious to such suggestions. Attending orientation last weekend helped cement that notion as I sat through the same shtick I've sat through at Normandale and the U of M. Here's how to check your e-mail, here's how to use the college's online gateway, here's a free pencil. Having a bonafide nun from the campus ministry lead everyone in prayer and being one of maybe ten present males (and one of only three in my entering class of 45) was a new development, but otherwise it was standard operating procedure.
Oh, and the continental breakfast was better than previous orientation-related breakfasts, but since I'm paying about twice as much per credit now as I once was I would certainly hope it would be. At this level of the educational realm, I feel that a solid ham-and-cheese frittata is to be expected.
I printed off my syllabi a day or two ago and was a bit surprised at the seemingly light workload. A lot of it looks like research projects and problem solving exercises; there's very few research-something-and-write-a-big-paper sort of assignments. I believe one of the finals is a take-home essay of (gasp!) eight to ten pages. Perhaps this stuff will prove trickier than meets the eye -- these are entry-level classes for the program, after all. Presumably, like any good graduate program, I'll soon start getting worked to death before getting spit out the other end a shattered and broken man.
We shall see how things go. Class starts next week -- I'll be over on campus Wednesday and Thursday nights from 6PM to 9PM. The Commute™, one of the big things I was worrying about, has turned out to actually be pretty decent. I can take an express bus from a block away from my office that gets me to St. Kate's in 25 minutes flat. For the return trip, I can take a relay of a bus (74) to the light rail to a bus (2) that gets me two blocks away from home in slightly under an hour. All said, that's not a bad time for taking public transit across the city and into another. And, at long last, I'll have an excuse to become a regular light-rail rider. While I was taking the train to orientation, I read a newspaper on the train and everything -- just like a big city captain of industry!
Besides all matters educational, work has continued to be entirely too pleasant. We hired a new soul to handle my previous work with answering the phone and sending correspondence. She's a cool character with a fine balance of cynicism and likeability who tolerates my barbs about her age ("Well if this job doesn't work out, you can always go back to riveting World War 2 bombers.") and returns them in kind ("Now this show is TV-14, so be sure to watch it with Elise.").
Since she took some of the burden off my shoulders, I've been free to pursue various technological projects that I won't describe in great detail. To be quite honest, even if I did, it would likely either make little to no sense or sound immensely boring. I think that IT folks need some sort of buddy program so that they can actually describe what they do on a given day to an audience that understands the quiet feeling of victory that comes with rewiring an unkempt server cage or creating a new spreadsheet showing each given DNS entry and how its IP address changes from the server to the load balancer to the firewall. Rest assured, it gladdens me.