Instead of taking the summer off, I'm taking classes, both to keep myself occupied and to get a core class out of the way. My schedule is the same as I said a month ago except that I'm not taking section B of 529 (the one about e-government). I decided that would be too much in just two weeks, and indeed, I am glad to have given myself a break.
Ordinarily I should have had all three of my classes yesterday, but LIS 560 was cancelled because of an unforeseen conflict on the part of the professor. My first class, on digital reference, met at 8:30, but luckily the instructor has more energy than enthusiasm than in the last 8:30 class I had. She's a PhD student and is both excited and adamant about the possibilities and the duties of digital reference. In this class, we are going to conduct digital reference, both asynchronous (which I have already done, through the IPL) and synchronous (through QuestionPoint). We will focus on the quality of the reference interview that takes place, with the awareness that sometimes the pressures and constraints of digital reference lead to the truncation or even absence of a reference interview. I wish that we had more than two weeks in which to do this work, but it should be interesting.
CSE 142 was a new university experience for me. It's one of those big introductory weeder classes, so there were upwards of 150 students in the lecture hall. Only once, in Germany, did I have a class that was anywhere near that big, and even that hardly counts because I stopped going midway through the semester. (Attendance didn't matter, and the professor's lectures weren't relevant to the topic of my paper.) I was surrounded by the unwashed masses of undergraduates, mostly freshmen, no less. I won't say it was horrible, but it was somewhat disconcerting. I have been spoiled.
Between my classes I went by the University Bookstore and picked up my textbooks and a new calendar for the 2003-2004 academic year. This is the third year I've used this kind of calendar (At-A-Glance weekly and monthly academic calendar), and I like it because it has just the right amount of space for each day (with space for times but none already provided, so that I can write to-do lists without assigning times) and extra note-jotting space for each month and week. If I didn't have scribbling room in my calendar, I would go crazy.
Today I registered for fall as well. I'm taking cataloging, children's materials, and digital libraries. (I was planning on conceptual database design but decided that digital libraries excited me more.) My schedule might change around again at the beginning of next quarter, if I find that one of these isn't worth taking. I also looked through the projected schedules for winter and spring quarters, and there are far too many fascinating courses that I want to take. That's always the problem with graduating.
So, a new quarter. A new calendar. A new year, in the middle of a year. The class of 2003 has graduated, but am I a second-year?