Saturday: it’s not just for sleeping in anymore.

One thing I’ve begun to notice about graduate school is that it isn’t a Monday thru Friday sort of deal. Or, at least, it isn’t for me. I set my alarm this morning the same I do during the week, and it’s irrelevent that I slept through it and, subsequently, somehow turned it off. The point is that though I didn’t wake up until nearly 10, I meant to wake up at 7 or so. In either case, I woke up, showered, dressed, and walked to school on a cold, rainy, windy Saturday morning. Chances are that I’ll be here all day, working on a project.

The project itself is a case study of an (imaginary) public library (except I think that they call them municipal libraries around here). This library has a crapload of things wrong with it, mostly due to the old management, Jerry, who is now out the door. The new management, George, has just received a crapload of money (why is a mystery), from the municipal officials, and know he has to come up with a battle plan for making the library not suck. But him, I mean that we do, and it isn’t particularly difficult except that the professor has a tendancy to be vague about what EXACTLY she wants you to turn in, until you’ve turned it in, and then she’s VERY exact about what she wants. Which is frustrating, to say the least. The last assignment we turned into her was a beautiful work of art, a diagram of how information flows through a library, complete with little people, flipbooks, and I even think it showed a full, synthesized understanding of the ways in which information flow happens. Turns out that she didn’t want synthesized anything, she wanted her buzzwords, verbatim, explicitly listed on the diagram. I’m not bitter, really….

Marianne Bailey, one of my favorite professors from Evergreen, once told me that graduate school was, more or less, nothing but a series of hoops that you have to jump through in order to get your degree. For the most part, I’ve found my experience so far to be much more fulfilling than that, except for this one class, which is characterized perfectly by her analogy. The jumping part isn’t even hard, by itself. Finding out where the hoop is, how high and how wide, and whether or not it’s on fire or coated with acid; that’s the tricky bit. But even if graduate school were just a series of hoops eventually leading to a degree, I’d still be here, though with substantially more gritting of the teeth. Fact is, I’m tired of correcting people when they call me a librarian. Sure, maybe I’m here for other reasons too: education, personal growth, etc. But the name thing, that’s definately the big one.