First Week Recap as a First-Year MLIS Student at UW

On September 24th, I began my MLIS program at the University of Washington (UW). It's been about 4 years since I decided that I wanted to pursue an MLIS, but with an offer from UW, the dean's scholarship, and the current socio-political landscape, it never felt more like the right time to pursue it. I was also accepted in the Pratt Institute and University College of Dublin (UCD) for their MLIS programs, but I chose UW for a multitude of reasons. Although, I would've loved to live in Ireland for a while, I felt like getting this degree in the U.S. was important as the current administration continues to dangerously spread misinformation. And this feeling was further validated in my orientation where my instructors constantly cracked jokes about the current state of our country and our current administration, but most notably was what one of my professors said about this program and MLIS as a whole (I am severely summarizing what she said, but the jist is there): if you aren't here to make change and are here just to get a degree, then you are in the wrong place. So far, many of my professors and instructors emphasize heavily on critical librarianship, and I think getting this education in the U.S. despite what is happening is important to make the change that I think this degree and field strives towards (or at least should). Another reason why I chose UW over Pratt or UCD was cost. Although UCD was cheaper overall, I was only awarded a €5,000 scholarship and I am limited in how much I can work while attending school, so in order to go to UCD I would have to take out just as many loans to attend the same program back home. Additionally, Pratt didn't offer me any scholarships at admissions, and although the courses and the internship opportunities in NYC were extremely tempting, the cost was twice that of UW and UW offered me a $12,000 dean's scholarship. Plus, UW is the top program in the world for the field (QS World University Ranking: 2), and I didn't have to move across the country or world to attend as I already lived in Seattle.

This quarter I am taking these courses:

• LIS 520: Concepts, Services, and Issues for Information Professionals (4)
  • Core course
  • Cost: $3,844
  • Instructor: Matthew Saxton
• LIS 570: Research, Assessment, and Design (4)
  • Core course
  • Cost: $3,844
  • Instructor: Itza Carbajal
• LIS 583: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Leadership (3)
  • Ethical Issues course
  • Cost: $2,883
  • Tracie Hall

My first week (and change) has been getting back into the rhythm of being a student after being out of school for over a year. It's definitely a skill that you kind of quickly loose if you don't practice it (both formally and informally), which is hard when you're working full-time. I definitely feel for the students in my cohort who have been out of school for much longer. My program has the biggest range of ages than a lot of the other graduate programs at UW, so you get a good variety of people who are pretty fresh out of their undergraduate studies and people who have been in the workforce for a while.

I think so far, my favorite course is LIS 520. I like the professor and the material he has chosen for us to read so far. We have been reading on critical librarianship and are now moving into learning about AI from a critical viewpoint. One of our readings from our critical librarianship week was a case study on a health library in Australia who had changed their MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) term for Oceanic Ancestry Group, which houses a lot of medical journals on Aboriginal Australians, but then changed it to Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. And why was this done? It was done to match the terms used in the U.S. census. And when reading this case study, that further confused me. Why would an Australian library use an indexing term from the U.S. to describe articles and materials relating to indigenous populations from Australia? It was later changed to Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, but it still brings a lot of questions to why a U.S. term was used for a non-U.S. context. In another article assigned for this course by Emily Drabinski titled "What is Critical About Critical Librarianship", a quote reminds of this situation, "Knowledge organizations structures are also about power, the power to produce both order and excess." (Drabinski 2019, 4). American knowledge systems are constantly prioritized, even in contexts where it doesn't apply. Further in the Drabinski article, she talks about how in a library in the Philippines, materials are organized according to the Library of Congress system because in the world of libraries it has become the standard for many libraries. But not all materials in this library in the Philippines are sorted into this system. Books written by Filipino authors or about the Philippines are sorted in another system. And perhaps this system works for Filipino librarians, but it does bring up questions about the role of American knowledge systems and what should be used instead in non-American/non-European contexts.

Overall I am excited and a bit anxious about my future quarters in my program. My anxiety isn't helped by the fact that I got sick right after my first week with what I thought was the stomach flu and then thought may be strep throat, but now I am just sat at home with swollen tonsils and an ever growing list of things I need to catch up on when I can finally return to class. I seem to get sick right after starting something new and big. I got sick right after the first week of starting my first full-time job out of college and now I am sick again. Neither sicknesses are COVID-19, but are annoying regardless. Luckily my instructors are understanding, but it sucks to miss out on class since my in-person courses are mostly discussion courses so I am missing out a lot on what my peers are brining up. My reading of the materials and lecture slides can only provide so much. Luckily the TA in my LIS 570 course is holding a remote reading workshop this week, so I will be able to participate in that.

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Drabinski, Emily. “What Is Critical about Critical Librarianship?” Art Libraries Journal 44, no. 2 (2019): 49–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2019.3.