So this is Graduate School

After a painfully frustrating enrollment period, I finally attended my first class yesterday. My acceptance to the program was delayed a few weeks because I was an idiot and instructed my previous colleges to mail my transcripts to an incorrect address. By the time I was allowed to sign up for class all the required courses were already full so I had to resort to taking an upper level elective titled Readers Advisory.
I am extremely impressed with OU so far. The admissions office was very patient and understanding about my careless mistake and worked extra hard to make sure things were sorted out by the time the enrollement period was closed. I am also very impressed with my professor who seems very experienced and knowledgable in several different areas of library and information science. Besides being co-editor of RUSA, Professor Van Fleet has also just been presented with the ALA Outstanding Library and Information Science Teacher Award. She has a wonderful personality and great sense of humor. I have a feeling I’m really going to enjoy this class.
Being upper level, most of the students in the class are either about to graduate or are at least half way through the program. So I felt a little out of place. However, during some of our in class excercises I found that I was at least almost at an equal footing with everyone else when it came to research and reference skills. Our out of class assignments will be time consuming but not difficult. There is a great deal of reading, at least for me, since I’m a slow reader. We’ll be reading one novel a week plus about a hundred pages of text book reading. Each novel will be from a different genre and we will then write an annotation for each to hand in at each class period. We’ll also be doing book talks and a patron interview. This assignment will require us to interview someone in the appropriate reader advisory manner and deduce from that interview a selection of five books which that person might enjoy to read. As you might of guessed, Mike is going to be my patron and I will probably be choosing books from the horror/sci-fi/fantasy realm.
The two genres I will be reading for the next class (we meet every other Saturday for six hours) will be Literary and Mystery. I’ve already chosen my Literary book, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor. I started reading this over the holidays but put it aside so I could dive into Dr. Zhivago which I got for Christmas. So far it’s an excellent read, unusual story and beautiful language.