academic updates: essays, grades + a masters dissertation
I have plenty overall reflections on my graduate school experience I can’t wait to share with you all, but I’m saving that until I get closer to the finish line. For now, I wanted to bring you a few exciting graduate school updates about how things are going and what’s up next!
so first, I’ve been crushing it at school?!
To be honest, I kind of still don’t believe it sometimes, especially as someone who had a rough academic experience in undergrad.
On all of my eight essays (~3K words each) this year, I got all As or also noted as ‘Passing with Distinction’! 🎉
Since the scale is different (see rubric below), I had to unlearn what I knew as a high score in the US and get over some imposter syndrome to realize that my grades were actually really really good.
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An ‘80’ is basically a ‘100’ or an ‘A’ but it’s also nearly impossible to get an 80 or higher in the UK. I even saw a joke on Twitter that said if you got an 80, your lecturers would think you were plagiarizing. Our professors made it very clear early on that no one gets 100 partly because it’s not a thing generally but also particularly not a thing for LIS (library and information science) cause there is no set right or perfect “answer”. It’s not like math where often you’re either right or wrong. LIS is kin to the humanities and social sciences where it is less concrete and always improving or being re-evaluated. So even though we’re using this rubric, it still doesn’t really apply to LIS in the same way either. However for a simple breakdown: ‘50’ is the minimum for a ‘Pass’ / ‘C’ and that means you wrote a solid/satisfactory paper; 60-69 is a ‘Pass with Merit’ / ‘B’; and ‘70’ and above is a ‘Pass with Distinction / ‘A’. An 80 or higher means you not only passed with distinction, but it also means you produced ‘excellent’ work that is considered of a ‘professional standard’ and could be publishable. I took 8 modules that each have one graded essay assignment each (which makes 100% of the module grade) and all my marks were between 71-80 with two 80s! Whoa, right?
When I got my marks and feedback for my Fall term essays back, I was completely stunned especially because I didn’t think I submitted my best work or gave it enough time. My marks were all high and my feedback had words like “excellent”, “high level of critical analysis”, “exemplary”, “commendable”, and “prescient”. To be honest, I didn’t even fully comprehend that these words were used until I went back to my feedback recently when preparing for my Spring term essays. One of the most affirming comments I got by some fellow friends that teach higher ed here was: “Holy sh-t, nobody ever gets an 80. No joke.”
That cracked me up! But also reminded me that not only am I doing the thing, but I’m doing it well! This means more to me than I can put into words. But I’ll try to as I get closer to the end of the program. For now, I wanted to share that exciting news with you all!
Nevertheless, one thing I am sitting with and reflecting on is realizing that despite hitting a lot of barriers that made me feel like I wasn’t prepared or qualified enough for graduate school, I was actually much more prepared and qualified than I thought. I just had to wait for the right opportunity (and people) that would let me showcase that.
so what happens next?
Great question! Well now, I am officially beginning my third and final term which is dedicated to my masters dissertation (or thesis as more commonly referred to in the US). It’s about 20,000 words and is a research project with a topic of our own choosing. We have until October 3, 2022 to submit it and that’s our final piece of work that we submit for our program that qualifies us for the Master’s degree. #nopressure
It’s going to be a lot but I’m really excited for it. It gives us a chance to dive deep into the topics that most interest us and be able to produce something that can contribute to the library and information science (LIS) world. Also major shouts to all the previous CityLIS students who put their dissertation on Humanities Commons (where my writing will be at once the program is done!) because it was really helpful in figuring out mine and getting my proposal approved!
My topic will be, *drumroll*, …
Reimagining Young Adult Collection Development Practices Through the Lens of Youth Empowerment
As folks know, I’ve had a background in youth work and a major intention for me in entering the library and information science field was to explore the intersections of the two.
Young people deserve to be and are capable of being active change agents and decision-makers in their lives and communities. After learning and writing about collection development in the course, I started to think further about where young people find themselves in these processes (not just in whether they see themselves in the collection itself). Generally, I want to look at what we know about ‘youth empowerment’ (i.e. agency/voice) and what that can look like as a theoretical approach for libraries in how they develop their YA collections.
In more official words, I’m aiming to firstly explore how understandings of youth empowerment could serve as a theoretical framework for young adult collection practices and, secondly and more broadly to connect and advance the various research on youth participation in collection development. I’ll do this with primarily desk research and by:
defining a theoretical framework by identifying the understandings and manifestations of ‘youth empowerment’;
selectively reviewing general and young adult collection development practices from academic and non-academic literature
analyzing (a) the relationships within and between and (b) the development of both youth empowerment concepts and young adult collection development practices
assessing whether ‘youth empowerment’ is a suitable theoretical framework for young adult collection development practices.
If this was a PhD and I had much more time, I would probably try to look at this in practice and do fieldwork, but one thing I learned quickly about the masters dissertation was that you have to be realistic about your time. Hence, I’ll be mostly looking at this theoretically.
But yeah.. that’s what I’ll be doing over these next few months. T-minus 4 months to a Master’s degree!
If you ever come across any kind of resource (literally anything) that relates to this, please feel free to send it to me!
By the way, I’ll be using the hashtag #reneeistoMLIS to share my progress on social media as well!
And as always, all kinds of support welcomed - see all the ways you can support here.
p.s. if you’d like a small taste into some of the writing I’ve done for my program, you can check out these three short reflection blogs I did for my Data Information Technologies and Applications course:
Bibliographic Data + WordClouds: A Visual Reader's Dream or Nightmare?
