Final Reflection

Well. It’s all over. The fat lady has sung. I completed my final quizzes for Cataloging last night and sent in my notes to her about the graded assignment, everything is done for Library 2.0 and has been for a while, and once I finish writing this entry and submit it on Sakai, everything will be done for Research and Evaluation as well.

This has been quite the semester for me, since it’s been more like a mini-mester and I’ve never had to do that before. I also haven’t taken summer classes since between my sophomore and junior year of high school, when I had to boost my math skills and prepare for the SAT’s.

I finally paid my summer term bill the other day, and it costs more than it’s going to for me to go to Greece, even accounting for all the extra sunscreen I’m buying. In the memo line on that check, I was so tempted to write some rather off-color remarks. I think I’ll save them up for my final semester(s), which are coming up fast anyway.

In terms of the proposal process, which I realize is what I’m really supposed to be writing about here, it was definitely a lot trickier than I was anticipating, and to make matters worse, I believe I did it kind of incorrectly anyway – I wrote more of a research paper than a research proposal. As I believe I have mentioned, if I had to do it over again, I would have either not signed up for summer classes knowing that I had a big trip at the end of the semester, or not signed up for the trip in the first place because it really hampered my ability to think clearly and devote as much time to all the projects I had on my plate as they deserved and required. Ultimately, I’m pretty sure that if I had been able to stay focused enough to write more of a proposal than an actual paper, I would have had a much easier time of it anyway – not to say that writing research proposals is an easy task, but it’s steeped much more in analysis of methods and questioning rather than analysis of conclusions and then answering all your questions. Ah well.

As I also said in my individual journals, the ironic twist to all of my research was that it was on information overload and information fatigue and information anxiety, and I experienced all of these things to the Nth degree all throughout the research and writing process. It gave me a whole new appreciation for the topic. It was also interesting for me because every time I printed out a new article I would immediately wish that I had just done a CTRL+F search for key terms while it was still online but reading online makes my head, and one of the things I had tired to learn about while researching were the different ways that technology can help and hinder the issue of information overload. Life imitating art?

But hey, I survived and I am fairly unscathed – well, I will be unscathed assuming I don’t fail any of my classes, but I kind of doubt that will happen…not to jinx anything, obviously.

I hope you all enjoyed your semesters and will continue to enjoy your respective summers! For now, I bid you adieu and leave you with this tragically catchy Fall Out Boy video:

Research Journal Entry #16

I’m so close, I can almost taste it! I submitted my proposal for Research and Evaluation, along with my literature review and final project for Library 2.0 last night, and I just wrapped up my technical services report for Cataloging. Once this very journal entry is complete, I can consolidate entries 13-16 and submit those, and then sometime later tonight or tomorrow morning I’ll write my final journal reflection.

The only thing that really sucks currently is that I’m very on edge because Dr. Ma apparently doesn’t feel that any of my multiple emails warrant a response, so I have no idea when/how I’m supposed to submit my graded Dewey Decimal System assignment/follow-up quiz that’s worth 20% of my grade. Super nerve-wracking and extremely annoying.

Anyway, beyond that, I’m about as set as I can be. I may get out of work early today, which would be glorious (though financially disastrous, considering that I’m already missing all of next week and the following Monday, taking off this Friday and a half-day on Thursday) because then I would have more time to visit Steven at work (maybe), go for a run and maybe a tan, make something nommy for dinner or maybe get something to eat with mi madre, work on the reflection journal, and maybe even start on a movie until the boyf gets out of work. But in the worst case scenario, I won’t get out of work til the usual 5, and I’ll just have two extra hours of patient-free time to work on the reflection piece and also take care of all the listing I’ve been meaning to do for Greece – things to bring in my carry-on, things to pack, things to take care of before I leave, emergency phone numbers, addresses for postcards, etc.

Research Journal Entry #15

I spent the whole glorious day on the beautiful beach yesterday, from 9am to 7pm, drinking rum and napping in the sun and dancing and eating scallops (in no particular order). I started on a new book today, Maine, which is J. Courtney Sullivan’s sophomore novel and so far I like it. She has a very comforting writing style, and she makes the everyday gripping (but not in a creepy Hitchcock way). Sometime tonight and/or tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be submitting my proposal, literature review, web 2.0 service project along with its implementation plan/reflection piece, perhaps the 4th research journal if I can think of something else to say sooner rather than later, and the technical services report for Cataloging…maybe. When I’m not doing that tonight, I will hopefully be watching the Bachelorette and eating ice cream. I can’t even deal with packing for Greece until at least Thursday afternoon, and then Harry Potter is Thursday night/Friday morning! The end.

Research Journal Entry #13

My amazing weekend is definitely over – I spent several hours this morning crying on and off about all the cataloging nonsense I have to try to make some sense of, and I just don’t get it. It’s frustrating, disheartening, and terrifying that I could fail the whole course based on having severe difficulty with one project even though I’ve been pulling 90’s/100’s on all the quizzes, doing my homework and actively engaging in the online forums, and really focusing on the material, and all for a class that means absolutely nothing to me and has virtually nothing to do with my future career (assuming I ever even get a library job anyway and don’t spend the rest of my life as a secretary or waitress).

Anyway, to cheer myself up, I did start chipping away at my graded Dewey Decimal System assignment, and that’s not entirely unapproachable…merely confusing and contradictory at times, but maybe I’m just doing it wrong. I also put the finishing touches on both of my papers (the protoproposal and the literature review), tweaked a few things in my implementation plan for the 2.0 service project, and all my citations are done, and I did some mental packing for the trip to Greece (which is only 10 days away, ohmaigash). So it wasn’t a total loss of a day. I guess.

I am now looking forward to eating some lovely berries and cheese and heading home cause I get out early today (at 3, woohoo!) and body planting myself onto the boyf asap.

Research Journal Entry #6

Well, I’ve hit another road block regarding my research. Basically, I’ve read approximately a dozen articles, but only four of them are direct reports of research done by the authors themselves, and I need at least five. Sugar fudge.

Besides that, my annotations are going pretty well. It’s difficult for me to gauge what the strengths and weaknesses of each study are, but I’m managing. Figuring out the intentions of the researchers, the methods, and the results is pretty easy.

My goal is to finish the annotations by tomorrow afternoon on my lunch break, and then finish my readings for the Library 2.0 Literature review by Friday so I can start putting both of these projects together by the start of next week, and hopefully finish both of them by the end of June, so then I’ll really only have to worry about Cataloging for the first two weeks of July and then I’ll be g-o-n-e.

But in order to finish the annotations, I will probably need to figure out a fifth article…and there just isn’t that much research out there already on my topic specifically. Lots of information on how it relates to marketing, lots of information on how to manage it, but not a lot of information on information overload itself, which is weird.

And in order to finish my readings for 2.0, I will need to be able to stay awake while reading for more than half an hour at a time. Ugh. Easier said than done. The topic (how Facebook/social networking has affected interpersonal relationships) is actually really interesting to me, but I am not a natural reader. I am a natural sleeper.

Anyway, time to make dinner (mixed veggies sauteed in garlic and olive oil with whatever spices I can find in the cabinet…I wish I had some kind of sauce to go with it, but alas, I am a poor girl and a poor meal planner sometimes) and start on all that homework.

Research Journal Entry #4

I’m afraid I don’t have much to say in this entry. I think I’ve gotten past the gripping fear of having selected all the wrong articles upon which to base my own research, having been assured that solid, qualitative research is just as acceptable as quantitative. I haven’t had a chance to go through the bibliographies of my best sources yet, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to do that during my lunch hour tomorrow or on Wednesday (I won’t have time in between because I’m going on a road trip to Montreal with one of my best friends and her sister, just for one overnight and an afternoon).

I did, however, extract all of the quotes that I had previously highlighted over the last few days, and now I have a lovely 8-page document just loaded up with quotes waiting to be shuffled around into categories and turned into something resembling an outline.

Now I’m off to clean out my car, run some errands, go on a run myself, make some granola, make dinner, then babysit my boyfriend’s little sister.

Am I in Greece yet?

Research Journal Entry #1

I’ve decided I’m also going to use this blog as a way to write and keep track of my Research Journals for my Research and Evaluation class, also taught by Professor Adams. So, nobody freak out if you stumble upon this and suddenly think you’ve missed something on the syllabus. I’m just mixing it up a little. So, with no further adieu, Journal Entry #1:

Our first class for Research and Evaluation was two days ago, and I left in a conflicted state of sheer panic, preemptive exhaustion, and numbing acceptance of my fate. A 20 page paper isn’t wholly unexpected or particularly unreasonable, but I had somehow managed to hold “a perfect carefree summer” and “a productive academic summer” in my head as two separate entities leading up to this week, and now I realize that these two are mutually exclusive. It also doesn’t help that I will be in Greece for the last week and a half of the summer semester, so the 10 weeks that I am granted to complete the assignments for this class (and my two others) is suddenly condensed to 8. But at least I’ll be in Greece, right? Gotta take the good with the bad and look on the bright side.

During class, I decided to focus my paper on the effect of information overload on individuals, and I spent almost this entire morning sifting through title after title and abstract after abstract, looking for relevant articles to print out. I suppose I would mostly like to gain some statistical insight on whether access to a surplus of information aids in processing and analysis and the subsequent formation of one’s own opinions based on a variety of others, or whether it increases the likelihood of becoming overwhelmed and either shutting down entirely or after only accessing one or two forms of information and then forming an incomplete (and possible unofficial, unfounded) opinion.

A personal example of how a surplus of information can be beneficial to the information seeker is when I am looking for a recipe online. Obviously, if I’m looking for a specific recipe that someone suggested, I have to find that particular one, but if I am just hoping to make some meatballs for dinner, then I can easily access a variety of recipes through Google, and after doing a brief, informal comparision and analysis of the varied ingredients and measurements, I can make my own version, and I think that this makes me a better cook in a lot of ways. However, if I am looking for an accurate account of a recent newstory, such as the assasination of Osama bin Laden, I can go to the typical news circuits like CNN or the BBC or the New York Times or check out the White House PR and try to figure things out from there, but what if their account varies slightly? What if I’m the type of person who believes that what the government says is true and what is actually true vary greatly? I do actually feel that this is (at least to some degree) an inconvenient truth in politics, and I frequently feel the need to investigate for myself. Unfortunately, however, there are just so many conspiracy theorists out there now that it’s almost impossible to access them all and take them all into consideration, and I usually just give up before I even get started.