Initial Meeting with Dr. Lewis

My initial meeting with Dr. Lewis went fantastic! I am now even more confident that she is indeed the proper match for me with this class.

Dr. Lewis offered me a ton of advice, not all of which I am going to remember, so I hope I get to hear it all again. The biggest and best piece of advice that I think I took from this initial meeting was her suggestion to start saving and "bibliographing" (my word, not hers) relevant literature to my research topic right now. She stated that she waited about two years in before she started, and that turned out to be a mistake. She suggested I try to use a resource like RefWorks or EndNotes.

Another good piece of advice that Dr. Lewis offered was to tell me that as I try to gain experience as an instructor, I may benefit from creating folders and keeping track of what things didn't go well in a class and storing these notes in the folders. Dr. Lewis suggested this in part because once I teach a course, I may not teach that course again for another two semesters and I may forget what did and didn't work in that time. I had never considered this before, but as I can be the type of person that forgets important things from week to week, I definitely do not want to try to remember what does and does not work in a class a semester or two after I taught the class without a written record.

Dr. Lewis shared some other insights with me too, particularly about the weighting of teaching, publishing and service in the quest to obtain tenure. She has already started working on a plan to help me get some teaching experience as well!

I know I am in good hands.

First Entry

I am very much pumped up about my first meeting with Dr. Lewis tomorrow! I think one of the things that is missing from librarianship in general is the actual training and guiding of new professionals. I am confident from what I am seeing so far in this PhD program at the University of South Carolina that I will not encounter this same problem in my endeavors to become a scholar and a doctoral degree holder. Between the foundations provided in SLIS 801 and SLIS 804, and this opportunity to shadow and work closely with Dr. Lewis, I believe I am going to receive some wonderful insights on what it is like to be a library school faculty member, and what value a library school faculty member holds for the student, the institution, and the profession as a whole.

So, my first entry here is largely just to put on record that I have indeed scheduled my initial meeting with Dr. Lewis, and I am looking forward to it. I also think - based on initial email correspondences - that Dr. Lewis is the perfect match for me. She appears to have had some of the same initial thoughts upon entering a PhD program that I am having, and her path to actually getting the degree had some roadblocks in it that she had to overcome (and I am a king of stumbling upon self-imposed roadblocks). The fact that she is a very recent degree earner is also encouraging, because she likely is still sympathetic to the experiences of the student and can probably offer pointers that some other faculty members may have long forgotten.

Obviously more to come!