The Good Stuff

I feel like I have spent the majority of this semester whining on this blog. Shame on me. It hasn't been all bad, really! Sure, it's been stressful, I have felt even busier than usual, and my assignments have been super time consuming, I can still find some silver linings in the grad school clouds.

• One of my professors was willing to negotiate our assignment list meaning many due dates were changed and several assignments were reduced in size or deleted from the syllabus altogether.
• All of my professors are very understanding about the fact that we have families and jobs to juggle. Generally, if we have a hard time getting an assignment turned in on time, they are willing to work things out with you.
• I expected to be in class every Monday night from January through May. Instead, we only met about twice a month and next week (still in April) is our final class date!
• One of my professors was very organized and her class was very structured. Plus, she was very quick to respond to questions and grade assignments. It made life SO much easier!
• I have one other classmate at my ITV location...thank goodness! Having someone to contact with questions was so helpful. I am so glad I didn't have to go at it alone. Plus, it always helps to have a classmate that you can vent with.
• We always have plenty of time to eat dinner in-between classes. Honestly, I was very worried about this. Sitting in class from 4:30 until almost 10 p.m. without food or caffeine could only mean one thing for me: migraines. Mama's gotta eat! Fortunately, our teacher always gives us a 30-minute break.
• It was tough reading so many books this semester, but I really enjoyed it. It helped me have a reason to read some books/authors that I wasn't familiar with and might not have read otherwise.

See? I AM capable of seeing the glass half full...are you shocked? :)

Out of My Element

I'm not sure if it's being in a non-traditional classroom (ITV + internet) after getting used to a traditional class setting or just being in grad school or because I'm back in the education genre (almost everyone else in class has working experience in the field; I do not), or if it's just that we've only had one class day & I haven't gotten into the flow of things yet, but I feel a little bit like a fish out of water.

As an undergrad, I already had working experience in the areas I was studying, so I was confident. I feel a little intimidated by the many teachers who are in my classes. I guess I feel that I have nothing of value to offer despite the fact that most of them are newbies to the Library-Media world, too.

Luckily, I was chatting with my good friend online this morning and she said this:

"You'll get in the groove at school. That's exactly how I felt when I started, going into a new field that I didn't have as much knowledge about and everyone seemed to "know" more. In the end, I liked grad school much better than undergrad."

It's so good to have encouraging friends who have "been there, done that!"

I am a hard worker, so I have no doubt that I will do well. Okay, well maybe I have a little doubt, but at any rate I know I will survive. Everything happened so quickly, I kind of feel like I'm still caught in a whirlwind. Hopefully, things will settle down soon and I will get into a rhythm with schoolwork and better understand what is expected of me on a weekly basis.

Going to Grad School: The Backstory

I decided to go to grad school last Thursday. Classes began on Monday. How'd I manage that??

First of all, I had been encouraged by good friend (who is also a librarian) to consider Library-Media studies more seriously. She and I had discussed it in the past, though I had never really spent much time researching which universities offered Library-Media graduate studies. I began looking at our state schools just to see what was available. I also looked at one program--entirely online--that was out-of-state because I had a friend who was enrolled in it.

What really propelled me to start this semester instead of later was free tuition! I found out that one university had received a special grant to extend their library-media studies to the western part of our state (a.k.a "the boondocks"). The grant covers nine hours of graduate tuition! Awesome! The catch: students must come stay on-campus for three weeks during the summer term to take those 9 hours. On the upside, that's nine hours completed in three weeks...nine FREE hours I might add. Also, room, board and transportation are taken care of through the grant. Sweet! The downside, of course, is that I will have to be away from my family for three weeks. I will come home on the weekends, but I will be missing a lot of their summer activities and put extra strain on the husband who will have to juggle work and kids all on his own. Also, the campus is quite a drive--3 to 4 hours away--so there will be no quick trips home mid-week for anything. I keep telling myself that three weeks away from the family is a small price to pay in order to be on my kids' school schedules for the next 12 years of their lives.

When I actually started thinking, "I should do this....like, right now!" I had two pretty big hurdles: deadlines for enrollment were looming & I hadn't taken the GRE. Actually, the university that I am now enrolled in had started classes the day I called to talk to someone about the program. Talk about last-minute!

So, I quickly made the decision to give this a shot. I'm actually glad that there was a small window of opportunity to make that decision, otherwise I might have agonized over it for days. I started typing up applications, faxing unofficial transcripts, requesting official transcripts, e-mailing a trillion people for information, etc. Though I had once been an undergrad student at this particular university, it had been so long that I actually had to reapply for admission. That ended up holding things up a bit, but we finally got everything completed....yesterday (four school days after starting the process). I wasn't actually enrolled when I attended my first class. In fact, I paced the floor all day waiting impatiently to hear word whether or not I should drive to my ITV (interactive television) class. I had to leave by 3:30 to get there in time, and I finally heard back from the university somewhere around 2:30.

Luckily--VERY luckily--for me, this particular program didn't require the GRE for admission. God bless 'em.

I put out the admissions and enrollment fires, now I'm tending to the teacher certification fires! I'm getting a lot of different answers about whether or not I have to be certified before or after I complete the program and how I will go about certification. So now, I'm making tons of phone calls and e-mails to that end.

Maybe I should just be a firefighter instead!