The First (Half) Week

I quit. I've only had two days of classes, but I already want to quit. Here's a brief recap:

On Thursday morning, I had 580--Management of Information Systems. It's our required management core class, and I was not excited to take it. However, it may actually be one of the better courses I take at the iSchool (it's hard to tell after one class though). Our professor, Nancy G., is great, and she actually has real-world management experience (half our professors have never worked in a library or have real-world experience) and she's structuring the class to be a more practical course (rather than the iSchool's penchant for theoretical ones) and there's almost no group work (something else the iSchool LOVES). So it sounds pretty good, right? Well, Code Name "She" is in the class. And She sat right next to me! I won't go into all the details about She because it would take too long and would frankly be too mean. Suffice it to say that She is universally disliked by my entire cohort. Now I think Nancy had been warned and she was able to manage She pretty well. In the future, I just have to make sure that She doesn't sit next to me, or there may be a bloodbath.

Well, I didn't have another class for five hours, so I caught up with some people, bought my textbook, and did the reading for my class that night--Information Retrieval Systems. The reading was something about Boolean searching and inverted files and only about half of it made sense. So then I went to this class, which counts as a required technology core, which also happens to be three hours long, from 4:30 to 7:20 every Thursday night. Half the class was made up of MLIS students, but the other half came from our sister MSIM program--the master's of science in information management. Oh, and one student who is a computational linguistics major. Early on we were promised no calculus and no programming, and then we quickly started talking about logarithms and programming. I'm pretty sure I have never ever learned about logarithms, and if I did then I have repressed all such knowledge. At the end of the three hours, the LIS students were traumatized, and the SIM students were all like, "but of course." I kind of thought this would be the easiest of the tech cores (foolish me!), but maybe I should have taken the XML class instead.

On Friday, I had another three-hour class, this one is Collection Development and Management. I think the material will be really important to learn and useful in the future, but I haven't made up my mind about the class yet or our professor. What I do know is there will be a helluva lot of work. She seems to believe in the principle that since this is a three-hour course, we will do nine hours of work outside of class. There are lots and lots of readings, online lectures, mandatory online discussion posts, and while there are only three assignments they are very involved projects. Oh, and She is in this class too. Fortunately, She is not in my group. And the class does end at 4:20 which means it's happy hour time.

I still haven't had Nancy Pearl's class which is six hours every other Saturday. But everyone loves Nancy Pearl and her classes, but there's still a lot of work to do. Okay, well it's time to hit the books. Oh, and Heidi and I built my bed--a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (literally) went into it, but I have bed now. So that's something.