All I really wanted to do was finish reading The Help. Which I did. Today. But this post is about yesterday.
The first thing that library school made me think of was how much I would miss studying English. Although there will be a couple literature courses in my continuing education, these will mostly be age-genre focused, with dull titles like Children's Literature and Adult Fiction. I don't know if I could stand taking Young Adult Fiction. I've already read Twilight. No more will I get to spend my evenings with a cup of hot chocolate, curled on a couch, reading Gulliver's Travels; "doing homework." No, now I get to take management courses and things about technology so I can make myself a marketable employee.
While I was musing over this thought, a lady with zero fashion sense got up in the front of the room and talked about an ice-breaker that she learned at a teacher's conference. About how fun it was. About how we were going to do it. If there is anything less pointless than a week-long orientation that teaches you how to use a computer, it is a frumpy lady telling you to bond with other frumpy people over how to best get people to remember your name. My name is a month. So it goes.
While my group took the Shakespearean route, other groups presented their ice breaker using a mixture of alliteration and game shows. As I learned everyone's name and got a vague taste of their personality, I tried to figure out how old they were. It was quite difficult. For example, one girl who I have gotten to know fairly well, who I thought was around 24, is actually almost 40. People who are in their mid-20's to late 30's fall in to this hazy group of adulthood in my mind; I never know quite where to put them.
While I listened to people teach me how to use WisMail, WisCal, WisDocs, and my new WisCard, I considered how much easier things would be if we all used Google for everything. But, needless to say, UW Madison likes to remind you what state you're in by attaching it as a prefix to WisEverything.
Perhaps my emotional capacity is running dry, but I find this week a bit pointless and nowhere near "required" knowledge. Half of my attention is spent trying to focus on the importance of whatever is being instructed, but that is a stretch. At least I get to see Carol for a whole week, which hasn't happened in years.
"Guess who's maid of honor!?!"
"...What? I don't know what that means! I need to check the internet!"
Not exactly the response I was expecting.
Oh, and that Metadata title? I keep hearing that word everywhere. From what I've gathered, it loosely means, "data within data," but there must be more to it than that.
"So when you import your bibliography to Word from RefWorks, sometimes your metadata will be messed up... like, here. See? It just put a line right through where the authors name should be. So look out for that.... yes?"
"That's MLA formatting for multiple works by the same author. You just put a line instead of the last name over and over. There's nothing wrong with the metadata."
"Oh, well, I just can't stand that, so you're going to want to change your metadata so it looks normal..."
It's cute when people can't stand to be wrong. It made me frustrated for even bothering to correct her, though.
It's nice to be able to escape to the library for a few minutes and have some time to myself. I can't stand the constant group atmosphere.
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