The 5 people you meet in library school
Well, the orientation for KM/LIS 5033 was Friday, and hopefully we’re off to a great start! The two sections that I teach are in Norman and Tulsa (as it’s online, natch!), so Dr. Snead (who has an additional Norman section of 5033, as the new student numbers were much higher than expected) and I shared orientation “facilitating” duties at both sites. Our new director gave an excellent and fun talk, OLISSA provided pizza for all, and I hope that everybody went home feeling pretty comfortable about the program and what it can offer them.
One thing I said during the orientation was that this program, at its best, is something like the book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. That is, you can both influence and be influenced by people you won’t realize were important to you until afterward. That influence can be both personal and professional, I believe.
For me, those “five people” back in the seventies when I was at school in Syracuse were: the creative theorist I never dreamed I could become (Bob Taylor, dean of the School), the best friend forever I wanted to become (Jon Martens, then a fellow graduate assistant, now my husband), the thoughtful scholar I hoped to become someday (Antje Lemke, humanities professor at the School), the teacher I didn’t want to become — ever—! (who shall remain nameless here, as she’s long since left both the faculty and the profession), and the hard-working information professional I needed to become very quickly (another of my classmates who will also remain nameless, but who seemed not only completely “grown-up” to me— as most people over the age of 25 did to me back then, when I was one of the younger students in the program— but who also delighted in the career possibilities ahead for us all.)
So, those are my five people. I hope everyone in my 5033 class will have at least that many “people” to remember from their time in our School.
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