Yesterday was my first day of class in the Geography graduate program at Portland State. I was a little nervous leaving work on the busiest day of the year, but was able to forget about it for a while and get excited about going back to school again.
The majority of the class was introductory stuff like Syllabus and reading material, but we also looked at the department and talked about other happenings. The class is pretty small and seems to have a fairly wide variety of people and interests.
Something that immediately stood out to me was the amount of reading to be done. It also seemed somewhat foreign to me that we have to “make photocopies” of the material to read. Having worked with instructors to create PDFs of reserve material so they could be fetched online at one’s leisure has warped my perspective on the matter. Maybe I’ll bring it up.
Now I’m looking for bibliography software (or a web app) so I can keep track of all this stuff as I read it in case I need to refer back to it. So far, BibDesk takes the cake, but I’m looking for something a little bigger – like an online personal depot that can also store my electronic copies of this content. Heck, Moveable Type could probably work.
Anyway, I’m started and relieved to hear that 3+ years for the program is about average. I’m a slow reader, you see.
Why feel badly about leaving on the busiest day of the year? Noah’s done it two years in a row, so we get to train his students for him. Because we have all that extra time. Do I sound annoyed?
When I was in lib. school 93-96, Duke was already using electronic reserves, so pdxU has no excuse.
I agree, why feel bad when Noah has done it the last couple of times? I’m also annoyed…. Hasn’t he heard of customer service and that you don’t schedule time off during peak times?
Anyway Andy, you deserve the time off for all the hard work you do for the college!
ETC….
I appreciate the compliment, but I really feel sorry for the blokes at the student help desk. They get treated poorly by customers, don’t hardly have time to breath between calls, and just generally get beaten the first week or two of the term. That being said, I don’t miss it at all :)
I’m tempted to get all the material in PDF and just bequeath it to the instructor at the end of the term.