Blogging After School

Some people have asked (or commented) about my plans for this blog after finishing school. I will readily admit that my blogging frequency took a dramatic downward turn during the summer of 2007. Initially, I felt the need to cut back on blogging because I was incredibly unhappy in school. I had nothing positive to say and I was in danger of allowing the bad experiences to overshadow my entire school experience. Somewhere deep down, I had lost my ability to give a fair assessment of the reality of graduate school – I and sensed that if I continued to allow myself to give in to bad attitude, it would overshadow my remaining time at SCSU. Overall, I think this was the right move for me to make at the time. Blogging continued to be a lower priority for me, even when my school experiences started to become more positive. Despite this lag, I’m not necessarily ready to give up on it.

To this day, I am still surprised by how much I have come to enjoy blogging. I do not believe that I can’t continue to blog in this venue now that I am done with school – even though library school was the original impetus for this blog. I’ve lost the desire to justify blogging as an activity – to justify a reason for blogging or for not blogging. I think that I will continue to blog about library topics that interest me, when they interest me. I’m pretty sure that I will continue to be interested in many library-related topics for some time. Beyond that, I do have a definite to start writing some wrap up posts about my educational experience in the near future. Overall, I’m playing it by ear. It will be what it will be . . .

Life After School

It has now been about 3 months since I finished up my school work and about 2 months since I felt as if I were “officially done” with my MLS program. Honestly, I’ve done very little outside of work (which has been horrendously busy) and am quite happy with this fact. Rest and relaxation is something that I seriously needed – maybe still need since work has been kicking my posterior a bit lately. I’d love to write about the fact that today a total network outage on the college campus where I work was caused by the fact that a patron in the library plugged one data cable into two live network jacks, creating a loop and making my life miserable, but I am desperately trying to forget about this.

Going to school, even part time, while having a full-time job, is not something that I found easy. My job, which can be incredibly stressful, can often require a great deal of my time and energy. Admittedly, I make this worse because I am the type of person who probably gives my job too much of my time and energy. However, given that I actually love my job most of the time and am not in a position where my husband and I can exist on one salary, the job has always had to take precedence over school. I also had to make sure that I made my family life a priority. While my husband was supportive of my decision to return to school, there were many times when I had to sacrifice time for school work in favor of making sure that I had a happy marriage. All of my remaining time went to school. Now that I am finished, it seems to me that I put my life on hold during the last 2 and a half years, giving all of my energies to my job, my home life and school. Now, I am a bit at a loss as to how to settle into a post-school life. I figure it will come, but am in an interesting sort of limbo-y place right now.

As I read through the first part of this post, it sounds a bit depressing. Interestingly, I don’t intend the tone to actually be that way. I almost feel as if I am in the same spot where I was before I decided to return to school – a place where I’ve become rather passive, allowing life to happen around me rather than being an active participant. Personally, I think this is a space that I sometimes need to be in, but don’t believe it is healthy for me to hang out here for too long. I’m taking the fact that I felt the need to write this post as a sign that I’m trying to break myself out of this limbo-y, passive state – that I a ready to take a more active role in my life. Hope springs eternal

While I may be done with school, I need to find new avenues of keeping myself interested and engaged in things that matter to me. I need to move beyond the school experience to that which will come next in my life (whatever that may be). I did think that I might be able to rest on my laurels for a bit longer, but know that I need to feel as if I have my life back. Hmm, I hope that isn’t as difficult as it sounds.