Year of Gratitude - Day 56 - MLIS from Wayne State University

I really enjoyed getting my masters degree from Wayne State University's library and information science program (it's a school now). The experience I gained, the friends I met, it was all fantastic. And you can't beat being in Midtown Detroit, especially in the summertime. It was a lot of fun.

Student Caller Reception at Wayne State University

Usually I'm a bit ambiguous about my work places. Anyone with the ability to read could figure it out. In today's post, however, there is no ambiguity necessary. I am happy to say that Wayne State University is one of the absolute greatest places in the world. Allow me to share.

Last week, I had the honor of sitting in a room with some of the coolest and hardest working kids at Wayne State - the student callers for our annual giving program. Now, quick explanation - I'm in philanthropy and these young men and women are the FRONT LINE fundraisers. They are the people that call you, asking you for money on behalf of your alma mater. Some of us, the alumni, are super rad and give a fatty gift. Others are cool and don't mind that we called them twice in the same week because of not-so-great data. Heck, they give twice! Some of us require negotiation and extra convincing. And then some of us are total assholes.

But these students will give ALL of us a call and I loved getting to know them. I sat with them and I heard their stories. In my mind's eye it felt like the sun was rising on Detroit's future. I saw all these young people developing relationships, sharing experiences, delivering presentations (to the Board of Governors no less), enjoying intellectual banter, supporting each other, cheering for each other, laughing with each other. I joked to my colleague, "Why don't we have this much fun?" Which, of course, we do, but we all had a laugh.

I looked around the room and saw such potential, solidarity, diversity, enthusiasm and straight up smarts. These kids were sharp. All of them are obviously going to change the world in some way. I hope they chose to do it through philanthropy. A colleague told me how she runs into former student callers at professional conferences all the time. I'm not surprised. Shoot, I'd like to get a couple of those kids into Beecher House ASAP. It's time Wayne State University keeps some of that talent where it's needed most: home, Detroit, Michigan.

My experience gave me more clarity about why I love higher education: the students. They were all enthusiastic, high performers. My buddy and I sat at the ballers table. I seriously considered whether we were cool enough to be there. I felt like the freshman at the cool kids' table, but they made us feel welcome. Our table was a loud and fun bunch, but the whole room felt like a group of buddies. It was great. These students are what make Wayne State University the best place in the world, for learning, for friends, for life.

One president steps aside, another steps up

Yesterday was a pretty intense day and it had to do with two presidents: former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Wayne State University's 11th President, Allan Gilmour.

Around noon on my way back to the office, a young man passed me holding the Egyptian flag above his head, smiling. It was 8 degrees out, but this young man was elated in the frigid sunshine. When I sat down to my computer, I heard the news that Mubarak stepped down. I watched the celebration live. Before my very eyes, history unfolded. The people of Egypt spoke as one, powerful voice and accomplished something epic together. Reading the New York Times coverage today has been amazing, as was watching the Al Jazeera coverage all yesterday. It was truly one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed. We will see what the future holds for Egypt.

A couple hours later, my entire division got to hear from President Allan Gilmour. This man is incredible. He's already the talk of the campus and especially Beecher House. Just the other day he came up to our office and introduced himself to EVERY SINGLE PERSON on our staff. What a guy! After he spoke yesterday, I felt really confident in having the university in his hands. So did others. People told me later they had to hold back cheers as the president went from point to point. There was no battle cry at yesterday's meeting, but I still felt that everyone in that room could rally around the president. He spoke so eloquently and honestly. He clearly stated he knew nothing of Wayne State back in August and he sees something here. He has vision and he's for keeps. With his guidance, I think he's going to help us do incredible things.

Later at the bar, someone asked me "Do you think things will ever change?" I pondered that, because it's a very real question. The game here is exhausting to play sometimes. I've been on campus since 2005 in multiple positions. I've been in academia since 2000 and these kinds of institutions aren't exactly known for lightspeed improvements and progress. But about a year ago I had a sense that things were changing at Wayne State. There's no question that this ship's already turning around now. We will see what the future holds for Wayne State University.

Adventures in Management - Winter 2011

In the realm of management, I am starting to really become interested in more complex research projects and how to effectively divide the work. Projects with a number of moving parts and a lot of cooks in the kitchen require a certain amount of direction, review and reporting and I think I'm still searching for that mix right now. I think I have a knack for delegating, but I would like to get into the literature a little more and see what I'm missing.

Reading has been a big focus of mine, but I haven't seemed to be able to capture enough time to sit down and absorb heavier stuff, like professional literature. I picked up two books by Scott Adams, the creator of the comic Dilbert and author of The Dilbert Principle and The Joy of Work. Admittedly, they're not the greatest books for positive managerial reading, but I've found a slightly different perspective on them. They are indeed hilarious, but The Dilbert Principle was written in 1996 and some of it still holds. I'm happy that Dilbert only reminds me of past jobs and not much relates to the present.

My job gets cooler as it gets more challenging. My department has been helping the entire division use information in a whole new way. We are reaching out and becoming more proactive. I think people are still getting used to our availability. We are using a variety of new and different tools. Our efficiency and productivity have increased. We just got an official new president, Allan Gilmour, for the next two years. It's definitely a time of growing at Wayne State. It's time for some healing in Detroit, finally.

Order out of chaos

At a meeting just before Christmas break my boss said that I often made order out of chaos. I chuckled at the thought of my parents hearing that. The last two years of my professional life was figuring out where my department was, where we had to go and getting the team ready to GO. Maybe my boss already saw it then, but apparently some of the chaos was turning to order. As January wraps up and I look back on the first month of 2011, I think I starting to see it, too.

While I love trying to make sense of it all, I realize it's really freaking hard. My work in higher ed has taught me that I can take nothing for granted and that I have to do my homework and check it thrice. It's challenging, but entirely exhilarating when done well. I find in my personal life sometimes others don't see it that way. Though people will banter on all varieties of subjects, they can't go very deep when confronting the complexities of a topic, be it racism, revolution, world economies or poverty. There are many examples of aborted conversations in my personal life. And as a librarian I have seen people crash and burn at the very thought of some real deal research to try and understand those complexities.

Over the 2010 holiday I picked up a few full-day shifts at the public library. It sort of took me back to the old days of 8 hour reference desk shifts at an academic library I worked at. I shuddered. Working that long with the public is exhausting, especially you're pedaling information and not a commodity.

In the first half hour of my afternoon shift, I got a call from who is hands down my favorite caller to date. First, if you know who Underdog Lady is on the Howard Stern show, then you can pretty much substitute that voice for my caller. That afternoon, the patron nervously asked about two cities up north and which was better for a homeless person to live in.

"I know it's not an easy question to answer," she quickly said, her voice teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack. I agreed that it was a difficult question and had a few moving parts. I assured her that with a bit of research we could at least start answering that question.

I commenced with the reference interview. The first city that actually popped into my head was Portland, OR. She wasn't very interested in that. I began to ask her questions about what type of data she was looking for, basically, what she meant by "better for a homeless person."

"No data," she replied.

No data. Of course not. I asked her why she wouldn't be interested in say how many homeless shelters, churches, missions, etc. there were in the cities. I said that there was information about how much private funding goes to counties' humane causes. I asked her why she didn't want to browse some newspapers for stories on the homeless in those cities. Our NewsBank database subscription is tremendous and has a comprehensive collection of newspapers from all over the state, not just the main rags. What about census info on poverty? She would hear none of it.

Anyway, I knew where all of this was going. It was only a matter of time before my trying to answer her question would make her have a mini-meltdown. And so it began with a pause...and then...

"Well, can I have the phone number to (City 1)'s police depart-- no- never mind, this is getting too complicated," and hung up on me. The end of this call was very similar to the last.

The encounter lasted about five minutes and I thought back on how it could have been different. How could the question be answered better? I recalled the first call with this person a few weeks back and decided she was looking for a quick answer from a librarian that is easy to understand, no more than 2-3 sentences and still completely legitimate. The acceptable answer to her question would have sounded like this, "(City 2) is better for the homeless because people are friendly and the police do not harass the homeless too much." Yet, because I would NEVER make assumptions on things I don't know of, I would never throw a quick answer out like that.

Which brings me back to making order out of chaos. It's terribly difficult. Higher education and my adventures in research have taught me that the truth is never served up on a silver platter with no strings attached. In the case above, the truth was there and could have been discovered, but not without work. You must work for knowledge.

A tale of two men...Lech and Warren

Last week was one that I will never forget. One Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2010, I met Lech Wałęsa, Poland's past president and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Two days later on Oct. 28, 2010 I helped host Warren Graham, author of Black Belt Librarians and all around library security expert. Whenever a week of complete chaos like this takes hold, I feel such incredible satisfaction afterward. This weekend I reflected on the week's exceptional events. Life happens so fast that by the time the words are out the memory is already faint.

Lech Wałęsa & adventures in solidarity
In the last few weeks I was a nervous wreck, especially when I thought of meeting President Wałęsa. I called my mom with more frequency and visited her for crash courses in proper Polish. I would only have a moment's time with the man, but I didn't want to make some glaring mistake like mixing up genders.

My moment would turn into two as I was asked to interpret for a union leader from Poland. What was supposed to be quick would turn into an invite to a lunch with dignitaries, where I would meet President Wałęsa and hear him speak twice. After lunch, the presidential party disappeared to give the president some privacy. He is still a very charismatic speaker, but the folks I sat with said he was much more tame than back in the early days of Solidarność. Time slows us all down in at some point.

There was about an hour between the lunch and the Solidarność Exhibit opening at the The Walter P. Reuther Library. Before I knew it, I was sitting with union leaders translating all types of automotive business talk to the best of my ability. When union people get together, they want to talk shop no matter the circumstance. By the time we headed over to the Reuther, we were invited to an International Metalworkers' Federation (IMF) meeting in Detroit. After some translated discussion about the international reach of unions, we headed to the Reuther for the exhibit opening.

The exhibit opening was excellent and there was a great crowd on hand. I met the president of the second time and took a picture with him. He would speak again, longer the second time. I was in awe of the president's interpreter. While I struggled to remember words throughout the day, she never missed a beat and lost no meaning in translation. She even translated comedy well - it was brilliant. This was the most Polish I had uttered in many years.

Attending the IMF meeting will be exciting, but it does take me away from my work at Wayne State University. Unless I'm on a week-long bike ride, I get a little antsy being away from work, but I've gotten much better.

Black Belt Librarians (and Black Belt WSU Alumni)
The School of Library and Information Science Alumni Association had been rebuilding and this event would be the manifestation of our efforts. We had all the ingredients for a winning program: support from the WSU Alumni Association, the willingness of volunteers to get the word out, people contributing promotional material, people going shopping for refreshments, etc. Even though we all have jobs and we're all busy, everyone pulled together to make the day successful.

Over 40 people joined us to hear Warren Graham, who is nothing short of extraordinary. We gave out evaluations and every last one was a satisfied participant. Warren Graham's strengths are definitely in the fact that he's a very strong speaker and that he provides practical information that people could take back to their libraries immediately. "Awareness doesn't cost a dime," he would say.

I was happy the event turned out well and I'm happy that people are hearing about the SLISAA. I got inspired and tweaked the website a little bit. Finally.

Public library encounters make me question some parts of academia

This month I picked up a few extra shifts at Southfield Public Library and I've noticed an influx of students from colleges and universities getting ready to wrap up their semester. For me, it's been an interesting return to reference in a higher education context. I haven't worked in an academic library since 2007, but I still have a great working knowledge of WSU's library system because I constantly use it. There have been a number of patrons that I've run across in just the last week that make me wonder what the heck is going on in academia.

There was one day that people were asking about a lot of citation assistance. But it wasn't just "How do you cite this?" I found myself explaining to college students how you have to list your references and give credit to others when you use their work. One patron's professor told the class to write a paper, then the professor returned the papers and instructed the class to go to the library and find out how to cite their sources after the fact. It seemed to me that this was a wild goose chase. Don't introductory college English classes teach the basics of MLA and APA writing styles BEFORE they ask a student to write a paper? And if the class showed no compentency in the areas of APA or MLA, wouldn't YOU teach them before sending them to a library? I was not amused, but I was compelled to help.

I've written for a long time, so perhaps research paper writing and plagiarism have been on my radar for a while, but logic stands that you can't just steal other people's work, right? Anyway, that's what I found myself explaining while working at SPL.

The second thing that I found myself (happily) doing was telling university students that even though they weren't at Eastern Michigan University or at Wayne State University they still had access to their school's databases from any computer with internet. The first woman was in her fifties and her topic was family counseling. She didn't really tell me too much more, because I told her we wouldn't have too many academic journals. She asked if Borders would have them and I said no. I found out she was going to EMU, so I told her she had access to their library system. I sat her down, helped her log in and started her on two psychology databases. Just like that she went from "I've never done research" to conducting her own searches in her school's databases. It was great.

Within an hour of that encounter, a Wayne State University student came up to me asking about the microfilm readers. Now I was REALLY have flashbacks from my academic library days. I spoke with her and looked at some old indexes and then she shared more about the project. It turned out that she could only get articles from either the New York Times or the Washington Post on certain topics. WSU's library system has full access to many, many years of digital, searchable archives for both of those publications. Though I commended her for trying to use the newspaper and indexes, I knew that I was going to have to show her some of the university library's glorious historical newspaper resources.

I had a most resourceful hour with both students and it was fun work, however, it still made me question why these folks were not being given the knowledge that they need to succeed in higher education. I continue to be interested in teaching and I am thankful to work at SPL and continue to have the opportunity to teach in little bite sizes. Yet, these small looks back into academia make me wonder if there is a bigger role for me in teaching at the university level.

President Noren talks about Wayne State University's role in Detroit

I really enjoyed President Jay Noren's speech yesterday. He frames hope with strategy and clear thinking. His emphasis on evaluation is something that I'm particularly into. It is just good to be at Wayne State right now. Sometimes I can't tell if I'm just foggy with optimism or if I really do hear Detroit breathing.

You can either read the speech.

Or watch it here:

Internships, Assignments and other school things I won't be involved with...

This has easily been the strangest fall ever. For one, I'm not going back to school. I vaguely remember not going to school for a year after undergrad, but that was spent looking into graduate school. It was nice, but I knew the calm wasn't permanent.

All this lack of going to school has made me think about school more often, ironically enough. This could also be due my just being hired by my alma mater Wayne State University. I sort of always thought of myself as a person who'd be most comfortable in academia. Academia, after all, has been very good to me, especially in the internship departments.

The first internship from the University of Michigan-Dearborn was something I couldn't have imagined: I wrote articles for the Detroit Red Wings. As with a majority of undergraduate internships, this one was unpaid. Yet, money couldn't buy that kind of experience. Even now, almost six years later, I still pinch myself. I am still struck by how awesome it is to write about something that you love.

At the end of my graduate degree, I hopped onto the staff of Southfield Public Library as an intern. I just wrapped up this internship last week. It was amazing. I met lifelong friends there, got the full library experience and beefed up my resume to aid in getting a good job. This was a paid internship, but let's face it: it was still an internship. Again, the payoff was in the experience.

After a few months of hunting for jobs (in Michigan, of all places), I started getting down on myself and my accomplishments. I wondered what the point of being involved in school was. I wondered if these internships were too amateur and weren't helping me. I wondered if I would have to turn to freelance writing. I wondered why the library world didn't have room for me. I waited for a sign as my anxiety mounted. I imagine I was practically unbearable for my colleagues at SPL, but they remained incredibly supportive.

Then my internships did the talking.

Within one week, I had been contacted by the Wings to cover opening night. Then I interviewed and snagged a position at West Bloomfield. Then I interviewed for a position at Wayne, which would become my current endeavor. Then the litigation consulting picked up. Some publishing consulting reared its head. There's even an archival possibility in the midst. It has been quite a ride.

So, although I started getting mopey, looking back I think I did a lot of things right. Perhaps my patience wasn't my strongest point, but the experience gained through internships and assistantships really pulled me through to the Promised Land (read, full time employment). My advice: get involved with school, find an internship and NETWORK. Frankly, nobody cares about your GPA.