Making the Most of YOUR iSchool Experience

As they progress through their respective programs, iSchool students gain a significant amount of knowledge. But what happens to that knowledge once the students graduate? In general, it gets lost, and each new cohort starts over again. Kathleen Walsh & I felt that we wanted to share what we had learned with other students, in the hopes that they would do the same next year. We also hoped that our experiences at the iSchool could inspire more people to get involved with the student groups and the activities of the iSchool. We decided to teach a one-hour session on making the most of the iSchool experience.

Because we are MLIS students, we focused our announcements and scheduling on other MLIS students. However, it turned out (mostly thanks to Mike Crandall's prodding!) that MSIM students were also interested in attending, so we scheduled a second session and made the presentation a little more general.

The main idea that I wanted to communicate was that students are responsible for creating their own iSchool experience. While there are required courses that everyone must take in order to graduate, there is a lot of freedom to choose one's own path. Taking courses outside of the iSchool can be a challenge. It's difficult to know what courses will be worthwhile, as well as which courses are manageable. This is an area where some type of institutional memory would be very helpful. Additionally, I talked about how important it is for students to be involved with the student organizations, and what we gained from being co-Founders of iEdge and co-Chairs of ASIS&T.

I was able to utilize some of the techniques I learned in LIS 560 (Instructional and Training Strategies for Information Professionals) to make the presentation more engaging for attendees. I used anecdotes throughout, relating my main points back to my own experiences as an LIS student. At the end, we had a group exercise of brainstorming various events that might meet the needs of iSchool students and ways to get more cooperation between the four iSchool programs. We switched off between presenters and had visually interesting slides.

We had about 20 people at each session. The MLIS-oriented session was all MLIS students, and the MSIM-oriented session had mainly MSIM students with a few LIS students who had been unable to attend the other session. I believe the sessions went well and the attendees were satisfied with the information we gave them. Many of them subsequently ran for leadership positions on student organizations.

The presentations may have gone more smoothly if we had practiced more beforehand. I felt like I knew this material very well, as I had been living it for over a year, but my delivery would have been more organized and more cohesive had I done a few practice runs in advance. We received some great questions at the end that really showed us that our audience had been paying attention and really absorbed the materials we presented.

This was a significant experience for me, as I had not done a training presentation of this length. Putting together a joint presentation was a great experience and gave me a greater appreciation for leveraging the talents and strengths of each member of a collaboration. Training my peers in a subject about which I feel so passionate was challenging. The presentation needed to be more information and motivational than strictly instructional. I couldn't teach at them, I needed instead to take them on a journey through my experience in the iSchool. As that was a very personal journey, I needed to abstract it a level to ensure it worked for everyone.

Presentation Slides