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Vol. 28 No. 5 March/April 2001

A Tuesday in the Life of a Library Student

If I’m being good, which doesn’t happen often enough, I wake up at 6:15 a.m., drive to campus, and attend a fitness class at UCLA’s Wooden Rec. Center at 7:00 a.m. After, I shower at the Women’s Gym, get dressed, grab a bagel, and am seated in my class by 9:00. If I’m bad, which has happened twice this quarter, I roll out of bed, jump on the #1 Big Blue Bus (because parking on-campus is non-existent after 8:00a.m. and the Big Blue bus is free for UCLA students) and schlep myself into class at 9:15 a.m.

My 9:00 a.m. class is called Information Professions & Portfolio Design. The primary reason I’m taking it is to organize everything I need for my Portfolio. (The other courses I’m taking this term are: On-line Searching and Information Seeking Behavior.) Presenting a Portfolio of our best work/projects to a panel of 2 professors and an outside specialist in the field, is one of the options for graduating from Department of Information Studies. The other option consists of writing a thesis and defending it in front just the Profs. Since I’m not going to embark on another journey through academia after this degree, option one seemed a more useful tool to aid my employment seeking behavior.

Dr. Mary Niles Maack, the instructor of this course, has decided that for this class we will break up into 3 groups of 10 students, to discuss the "Core Learning" mandated by ALA for any MLIS/MIS programs it accredits. She also assigns us to correlate the Core Learning areas consisting of Information Organization, Access, and Management to actual course we’ve all taken while studying a UCLA. It’s a trying exercise for some courses which seem on the surface to have nothing directly related to these three areas, but after further reflection, one of my classmates, sitting to my right, reminds us that Assignment X is indirectly related to Access because of X, Y, and Z components. We acquiesce to what she says. After a 10-minute break, the groups unite and we have a class-wide discussion on the different manifestations of Core Learning.

I’ve been in a sandwich phase this past last month, so I have a BLT when class is over at noon. Then I check my email in the computer lab. Homework is often assigned to us via class listserv, so it is important to check. I glance around the lab and see many of my fellow students (especially the 1st years) gathered in small clusters working on group projects. Group projects are great when your team members are responsible and work well together, and not so great when the opposite is true. I learned much from my group projects last year, including HTML, Photoshop, and metadata tagging for digital resources, but this quarter I happen to not have any group projects (which I’m grateful for because trying to schedule my own time is hard enough without having to take 3 other people’s schedules into account).

I’m involved in several student groups and since I’m only on campus two days a week, we usually schedule meetings between 3:00-5:00 p.m., since there are few classes at this time. Today, however, is a rare day that I don’t have meetings. I do have to finish my reading assignment for Information Seeking Behavior with Dr. Marcia Bates, which is due tomorrow. For this class, we go through much literature on user studies. Some of the findings don’t surprise me, but the article I’m currently perusing deals with the information seeking needs of children and how they, as a group use, the Internet. It suggests one advantage they have over adults regarding Internet searching is their ability to easily learn in a non-linear fashion, because the Internet is structured non-linearly. It’s an interesting article, and I know the discussion the following day will be lively.

When I finish this assignment, I eat dinner at the commons, return to the lab, and log on to Dialog to start on my On-line Searching homework. Team-taught by David Cappoli and Stacey McKeever, the assignments range from finding the real name of the TV actress who played Vampira to finding the citation for the case United States v. Satan and His Staff using the databases Dialog, Lexus-Nexis or Dow Jones Interactive. What I don’t finish this evening I will try to work on tomorrow after the Bates class because with my work schedule, I won’t be back on campus until Saturday. And realistically the only time I get schoolwork done is when I’m at school, since I tend to get distracted when I try to study at home. I try to leave campus before 9:00 p.m. because the buses take forever to come after that time. Or if I drove, the parking lots are unsafe to go to alone. (There have been several unfortunate harassment incidents reported to campus security—this is LA after all.)

Everyday of the week is different because when I’m not at school, I work. Today, on the 20-minute bus ride home, I reflect on my schedule: Monday morning, Thursday, and Friday I work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Library. Sunday I work in the Hirasaki Resource Center at the Japanese American National Museum. I have class Monday night, Tuesday morning, and mid-day Wednesday. Technically as a grad student, I’m not supposed to work more than 19 hours. However, I’m putting in almost 30 hours because working only 19 would barely pay the rent since I’m not on a scholarship (curse the GRE—nobody ever tells you money is attached to your score) and didn’t take out a loan this year. Many of my classmates have a work schedule similar to mine, or they are married and relying heavily the income of their spouse or savings account, but they are also raising one or more children. Going to graduate school is draining because many of us have lives outside of school, and this is just one more thing to balance.

I get home, brush my teeth, and check my email before I go to bed. I am very tired, but I know that this schedule will last for only a few more months, since this two-year program is coming to a close for me. On one hand the end makes me anxious; on the other hand it is a source of consolation.

Rose Roberto
UCLA
Jet Propulsion Laboratory