Information Access & Retrieval

This is the class I'm taking this semester. So far, I'm not impressed.

My professor's clear communication of the expectations is admirable, but the expectations themselves are not--so, I have been busily living down to them. She doesn't expect us to read the assigned materials thoroughly, nor to understand most of the more difficult concepts in our textbook. The subjects she is lecturing on are things that I mostly learned in high school, or at least in my undergrad days, not graduate level material. Some of the things she's gone over I've already learned in my last class (which is mainly the fault of the program's structure, not the teacher herself). And her goal in guiding us through the process of writing our final papers seems to be to extinguish as much creativity as possible; i.e., if nobody's written about it before, we're not allowed to write about it.

Of course there are a few things I'm learning from it. It's been valuable to get exposed to a larger array of search engines, since I admit, I'm a Google-holic. And even if my final paper can't be at all innovative, either way I'll learn a lot about Natural Language Processing. In other words, there is a silver lining to this cloud. That, and we're already almost ten weeks into the semester, which is well over half done. If I can just hang on until May 7th, I'll be free and clear.

These are the kinds of classes that make me want to drop out, though. Completely unchallenging--but then, maybe I need some of that as I learn to balance married life, work, and school. At any rate, this summer I'll be taking the last required course, which I hope won't be too difficult since it's packed into a shorter session. Then, all I'll have left are electives. Woohoo! Genealogy, here I come.

My faculty mentor, who is a fantastic woman, thought that I should try and do an internship for 1-3 credits at a different kind of library. The only problem with this is that in order to do so, I would either have to do it at night or on weekends, take vacation leave for it, or take leave without pay. None of those is very attractive, especially the last one since my husband and I are trying to buy a house. I haven't talked with her recently, but we'll see what happens with that. I am thinking that right now it's not likely, although it would be interesting to get some time in a public library setting.