The Required Mentor Seek Out!!

As required, I sought out my mentor and invited her to the Mentor/Mentee Luncheon scheduled to take place on November 4th at 11:30 at the Faculty House. Oddly enough, I am probably not going to be able to go to a function that I am inviting other people to! I will probably be attending a focus group in Greensboro for my assessment class that day :(

In addition to informing Dr. Lewis of the luncheon, she and I discussed some business for roughly an hour earlier today. Here are the key pieces from that meeting.

Dr. Lewis and I are going to attend some meetings together, per Dr. Curran's suggestions in a recent email. I think that will indeed go a long way in my finding out more about the life of an academic. She and I will attend a meeting Thursday at 10 a.m. related to a research area that Dr. Sam will be discussing at ASIST. We will attend some other meetings as well, including an admissions meeting where decisions are made based on admission of students; Dr. Lewis thinks it'll be helpful for me to learn how these decisions are made and what goes into that process.

I will indeed be co-teaching a class later this month, and will be recording my portion of the lecture for that class on Oct 26th. I will be trained in how to use the recording equipment at 11 a.m. that day. Dr. Lewis gave me the assigned readings for that day, and my next step is to read over those and determine what I think needs to be pulled out of those readings for the lecture and - probably - additional slides. It's a lot of reading but someone has got to do it.

Finally, Dr. Lewis and I talked for a few minutes about some insecurities I have with publishing. I told her that I didn't quite understand what type of literature an information science professor would seek to publish, and where they would seek to publish it. She let me know that there is indeed a place for heavily theoretical stuff, and that heavily theoretical writing is often heavy in literature review and is often countered by others in the profession in later pieces (she offered the popular Michael Buckland piece as a prime example). She also let me know that there is a place for scientific studies, which I think would be more likely my focus when trying to publish; she said these things would get published in different journals form theoretical pieces much of the time. She also told me not to stress about the number of publications and presentations I have made so far after I told her that I am a little nervous about the fact that I may not have as many publications as others in the program. She said that different people have different experiences and that there are a number of things that are considered when bringing aboard new faculty, including teaching experience, which I will likely have a lot of as a result of this program.