As we get closer to Departure Day, I am finding out more things. It is exciting! I stopped counting each Day In The States because it stresses me out to think about. (I do know I am leaving a week from today, Wednesday the 15th. I am measuring my life in Wednesdays, much like how J. Alfred Prufrock measures his life in coffee spoons.)
Until about a week or so ago, I wasn't sure if I would be taking classes. This shouldn't have been this vague, but it was. Strathclyde does not offer a Masters in Literary Linguistics, but they do offer a PhD, and I need a Masters degree to be in a PhD program. (I believe I am a PhD-track student, but I'm not 100% sure. It's complicated, as you can see.) Way back in November 2009, which by the way feels like a lifetime ago now, I wrote up a research proposal for my application as a research ("PhD") student. Because I was not applying for a taught program - where there would be a set course structure - but rather a research program, it was unclear exactly what my first year would look like.
It looks like I will be taking two classes at Strathclyde -- one which is relevant to my research (!) and another which is a Postgraduate Research Skills Seminar of some sort. Additionally, I might be either taking or auditing classes at Glasgow University, which is our "sister school". (I am of the understanding that at Strathclyde I am in an English Department that focuses on linguistics, and Glasgow University has a linguistics department that focuses on English.)
It turns out that the day we arrive (Sept 16) is a book launch party for one of the creative writing professors. That night the English Department is having a party, which I will be attending, jetlagged and disoriented. Here I will be meeting the other postgraduates and my future professors for the first time, which will undoubtedly prove interesting.
Today I am wrapping up my research project at Harvard and Wheaton, and I still have to figure out what I am doing with my column. This weekend I am headed to Planet UNH to see a lot of people in a very short period of time. This whole-leaving-the-country thing is getting real!
Showing posts with label haaaaaahhhhvaaahhhhd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label haaaaaahhhhvaaahhhhd. Show all posts
08 September 2010
19 August 2010
quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
In case you were curious, the Tour De La Bibliothèques is still ongoing. Here is an illustrated guide to my life as a professional reader.
This is what I am researching, explained with dinosaurs and probably much more helpful than my previous post about it:
(from dinosaur comics by ryan north)
I go to Widener every week or so to get copies of articles to read. I look at an on-line catalog, request items, wait for them to arrive, make photocopies of them, return the items, and repeat. Here I am making sure I have all the pages of one article.
During the rest of the week, I come to Wheaton College's library, where I sit in the basement with the history books to read and take notes on my computer. Today I am reading about lying.
That's it! This is what I do every day instead of having an actual job. There's not much to say about being a research assistant. I don't have to get dressed up or anything; I just sort of sit somewhere, listen to music, and read. It's pretty self-explanatory, but I figured it was time to talk about something other than mail fails.
This is what I am researching, explained with dinosaurs and probably much more helpful than my previous post about it:
(from dinosaur comics by ryan north)I go to Widener every week or so to get copies of articles to read. I look at an on-line catalog, request items, wait for them to arrive, make photocopies of them, return the items, and repeat. Here I am making sure I have all the pages of one article.
During the rest of the week, I come to Wheaton College's library, where I sit in the basement with the history books to read and take notes on my computer. Today I am reading about lying.
That's it! This is what I do every day instead of having an actual job. There's not much to say about being a research assistant. I don't have to get dressed up or anything; I just sort of sit somewhere, listen to music, and read. It's pretty self-explanatory, but I figured it was time to talk about something other than mail fails.
03 August 2010
i am a visitor here; i am not permanent
Monday was Day 2 of Research at Harvard! Since I do not actually go to Harvard, I have really limited access to their resources. Though I have the privilege of merely being in this building, even if it is for such a short, short time, I am not really allowed to do very much. If I want to see something, I have to request it; about two hours later someone will deliver it to me. (I like to think there are library elves involved.) I usually interact with about two library staff members maximum.
As a "visiting academic" (that's really strange to say; do I even qualify for that title?) this there are only so many things that you can expect me to know. The floor plan, for instance, is not one of them, especially when you are allowed in a room and a half. Since I don't have stacks privileges, I have no idea where the books I am requesting are. I know a lot of them are generally rather localized in one place based on their call numbers, but I don't know where this place is. It's part of the mythical, forbidden places in the building!
So you can imagine my surprise when one of the librarians came back to my desk in the
reading room with two of my request slips and said "You can go get these yourself." What?! I can only be in here and in the bathroom! YOU CAN'T GIVE ME THAT SORT OF POWER.
It turns out that I'm allowed to be in a few more places than I originally suspected, including "up the stairs and in the big reading room". This room holds the most commonly accessed books and big huge mega tables for everyone to use. I guess this makes sense. Apparently everyone with access to the library has access to this room; it's in all of their publications about Widener, so I guess it's a kind of famous room. Kind of a shame, because the rest of the library is, in my opinion, way more beautiful than this one room. (The reading room I'm usually in is full of white stone and mahogany wood fixtures with stainless steel accents. We have a giant skylight above us. It is gorgeous.) But it's kind of like saying you like one palace over another... they're both gorgeous in their own way.
Just to get to this other room you have to go up a MARBLE STAIRCASE. However, nobody works in that room to help you, which is why there would be no point to me spending my time there. The library elves wouldn't be able to collect my resources for me.
Later I found out that I'm not granted access to one of the documents I requested that morning. I was sent to another room (Three rooms in one day! so exciting) and one of the librarians took pity on me. She is arranging for me to get special access to this one document! I have to wait for this request to go through, and I will probably have to bring latex gloves to make sure that I don't ruin it with fingerprints or something.
On my lunch break I half-listened to a campus tour guide brag about how she had been in Widener once. Harvard's campus tours won't bring them anywhere near the library the undergrads are allowed into, but they will bring you in front of Widener! Ha ha, kiddos, I AM ALLOWED IN WIDENER...for four more days this year!
As a "visiting academic" (that's really strange to say; do I even qualify for that title?) this there are only so many things that you can expect me to know. The floor plan, for instance, is not one of them, especially when you are allowed in a room and a half. Since I don't have stacks privileges, I have no idea where the books I am requesting are. I know a lot of them are generally rather localized in one place based on their call numbers, but I don't know where this place is. It's part of the mythical, forbidden places in the building!
So you can imagine my surprise when one of the librarians came back to my desk in the
reading room with two of my request slips and said "You can go get these yourself." What?! I can only be in here and in the bathroom! YOU CAN'T GIVE ME THAT SORT OF POWER. It turns out that I'm allowed to be in a few more places than I originally suspected, including "up the stairs and in the big reading room". This room holds the most commonly accessed books and big huge mega tables for everyone to use. I guess this makes sense. Apparently everyone with access to the library has access to this room; it's in all of their publications about Widener, so I guess it's a kind of famous room. Kind of a shame, because the rest of the library is, in my opinion, way more beautiful than this one room. (The reading room I'm usually in is full of white stone and mahogany wood fixtures with stainless steel accents. We have a giant skylight above us. It is gorgeous.) But it's kind of like saying you like one palace over another... they're both gorgeous in their own way.
Just to get to this other room you have to go up a MARBLE STAIRCASE. However, nobody works in that room to help you, which is why there would be no point to me spending my time there. The library elves wouldn't be able to collect my resources for me.
Later I found out that I'm not granted access to one of the documents I requested that morning. I was sent to another room (Three rooms in one day! so exciting) and one of the librarians took pity on me. She is arranging for me to get special access to this one document! I have to wait for this request to go through, and I will probably have to bring latex gloves to make sure that I don't ruin it with fingerprints or something.
On my lunch break I half-listened to a campus tour guide brag about how she had been in Widener once. Harvard's campus tours won't bring them anywhere near the library the undergrads are allowed into, but they will bring you in front of Widener! Ha ha, kiddos, I AM ALLOWED IN WIDENER...for four more days this year!
30 July 2010
Use your education and take an educated guess
You are probably all on the edges of your seats waiting to hear about Harvard. Am I right? HA! I knew it.
I didn't have any problems getting access to Widener. In order to be granted Library Privileges, I had to bring a letter from my public library stating that my needs as a scholar do not exist outside this one building. I was granted Reading Room privileges as expected, which means I am allowed in exactly one and a half rooms in this giant, beautiful library: the reading room and the bathroom (a bathroom doesn't count as a real room in my book; it's a little past the circulation desk, so I guess we'll call that space "half a room"). Apparently I am also allowed in a computer lab if I am not bringing a computer with me; because I am bringing my laptop that has been nullified.
Anyway, this is what my Harvard University ID looks like. (Please appreciate my terrible haircut.) I am allowed into Widener Research Library for 6 days per 12 month period. So even though this card expires a year from now, I have five more days in this library. A day is 24 hours from original swipe-in, so I am allowed to leave for lunch and whatnot. This does not quite factor in the fact that this library is not open 24 hours a day, but no matter. This is Harvard, they can do what they like.
In the humanities (or "Not-Science"), the word "research" usually is translated into "reading a lot of things." The professor I'm working for - an ancient man with an adorably out-of-date laptop - presented me with a 46 page bibliography and told me to look through it and select what I wanted to read. From there, I would find these texts in the library catalog. I am not allowed in the stacks (if you want a study carrel you have to apply for that too. This place does not fuck around!), so I have to request individual journals to make photocopies of the articles. I can request up to 10 things per hour; I don't know if anyone actually achieves this over the course of a day. Dr Green has borrowing privileges, so if I want to take any books out to bring home, he has to do it for me. He is very nice about this, if not very deaf; the rest of the Reading Room was not very pleased whenever we talked.
I spent the morning getting used to their library catalog and generally making a mess of my to-find list. You guys, this is what research was like before the internet! I filled out a bunch of request forms and looked up more things. I've used a lot of the journals listed in this bibliography... and I remembered that I didn't have to go to the Dimond Library to do so. It turns out that a few of these journals are available online through JSTOR! (Un?)surprisingly, you need a Harvard logon to use their JSTOR access, but through UNH's blackboard portal I can still use these resources. DEAR EVERYONE AT UNH: BLACKBOARD DID SOMETHING RIGHT FOR A CHANGE. WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND THAT. IT'S CONFUSING RIGHT?
I was still waiting for my earlier requests to come through, so I took a lunch break. I don't know Cambridge well, so I ended up going across the street to Qdoba and bringing my lunch back to Harvard Yard. In the maybe 30 minutes I was out there, no less than six people assumed I was a Harvard student and asked me for directions. I am pleased that I look appropriately collegiate.
When I came back, my requests had come through, so I now had the daunting task of remembering why I wanted them and making photocopies. I would just like to throw it out there how happy I am that UNH put all of our information on just one card; I have a separate card from Dr Green just for printing/photocopying. It took me three different documents to figure out that the copier auto-double-sides everything. This copier had a very effective guide of how it worked (COPIES COME OUT HERE, COLLATED PAGES GO IN HERE, MORE PAPER IS AVAILABLE AT THE DESK ASK FOR HELP etc) - clearly they realize that while the world's premiere academics can think about complex things they (we?) cannot handle Xerox machines.
Anyway, Dr Green had to run off to a meeting for the afternoon, so I ended up leaving Widener around 3 pm with three books, six articles, and a fairly infinite number of articles available on-line. Basically I do not have to be in Boston every day (which is a life saver, waking up at 5 am just to get into Boston around 8 was going to kill me!) However, I am now officially calling August the Tour De La Bibliothèques while I read and take notes. On Wednesday I read thirty pages about the sentence "I love you" on my way home; Thursday I camped out in my town's sometimes-commmunityesque college and brushed up on doing pragmatics.
Doing pragmatics is serious business.
I didn't have any problems getting access to Widener. In order to be granted Library Privileges, I had to bring a letter from my public library stating that my needs as a scholar do not exist outside this one building. I was granted Reading Room privileges as expected, which means I am allowed in exactly one and a half rooms in this giant, beautiful library: the reading room and the bathroom (a bathroom doesn't count as a real room in my book; it's a little past the circulation desk, so I guess we'll call that space "half a room"). Apparently I am also allowed in a computer lab if I am not bringing a computer with me; because I am bringing my laptop that has been nullified.
Anyway, this is what my Harvard University ID looks like. (Please appreciate my terrible haircut.) I am allowed into Widener Research Library for 6 days per 12 month period. So even though this card expires a year from now, I have five more days in this library. A day is 24 hours from original swipe-in, so I am allowed to leave for lunch and whatnot. This does not quite factor in the fact that this library is not open 24 hours a day, but no matter. This is Harvard, they can do what they like.
In the humanities (or "Not-Science"), the word "research" usually is translated into "reading a lot of things." The professor I'm working for - an ancient man with an adorably out-of-date laptop - presented me with a 46 page bibliography and told me to look through it and select what I wanted to read. From there, I would find these texts in the library catalog. I am not allowed in the stacks (if you want a study carrel you have to apply for that too. This place does not fuck around!), so I have to request individual journals to make photocopies of the articles. I can request up to 10 things per hour; I don't know if anyone actually achieves this over the course of a day. Dr Green has borrowing privileges, so if I want to take any books out to bring home, he has to do it for me. He is very nice about this, if not very deaf; the rest of the Reading Room was not very pleased whenever we talked.
I spent the morning getting used to their library catalog and generally making a mess of my to-find list. You guys, this is what research was like before the internet! I filled out a bunch of request forms and looked up more things. I've used a lot of the journals listed in this bibliography... and I remembered that I didn't have to go to the Dimond Library to do so. It turns out that a few of these journals are available online through JSTOR! (Un?)surprisingly, you need a Harvard logon to use their JSTOR access, but through UNH's blackboard portal I can still use these resources. DEAR EVERYONE AT UNH: BLACKBOARD DID SOMETHING RIGHT FOR A CHANGE. WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND THAT. IT'S CONFUSING RIGHT?
I was still waiting for my earlier requests to come through, so I took a lunch break. I don't know Cambridge well, so I ended up going across the street to Qdoba and bringing my lunch back to Harvard Yard. In the maybe 30 minutes I was out there, no less than six people assumed I was a Harvard student and asked me for directions. I am pleased that I look appropriately collegiate.
When I came back, my requests had come through, so I now had the daunting task of remembering why I wanted them and making photocopies. I would just like to throw it out there how happy I am that UNH put all of our information on just one card; I have a separate card from Dr Green just for printing/photocopying. It took me three different documents to figure out that the copier auto-double-sides everything. This copier had a very effective guide of how it worked (COPIES COME OUT HERE, COLLATED PAGES GO IN HERE, MORE PAPER IS AVAILABLE AT THE DESK ASK FOR HELP etc) - clearly they realize that while the world's premiere academics can think about complex things they (we?) cannot handle Xerox machines.
Anyway, Dr Green had to run off to a meeting for the afternoon, so I ended up leaving Widener around 3 pm with three books, six articles, and a fairly infinite number of articles available on-line. Basically I do not have to be in Boston every day (which is a life saver, waking up at 5 am just to get into Boston around 8 was going to kill me!) However, I am now officially calling August the Tour De La Bibliothèques while I read and take notes. On Wednesday I read thirty pages about the sentence "I love you" on my way home; Thursday I camped out in my town's sometimes-commmunityesque college and brushed up on doing pragmatics.
Doing pragmatics is serious business.
25 July 2010
Brain so good, coulda swore you went to college
I am starting a new research project with a professor at BU this week. I'm very excited, there's something wonderful about starting a new project. I don't know all of the details about my role as Unpaid Academic Slave Labor, but I do know that I will be spending a lot of time in two libraries. One of them is the BU library, which pretty much anyone can walk into.
The other one is Harvard's Widener Library.
Harvard has a lot of libraries. They all seem awfully specific. Some are more strict than others, but overall the general rule is that if you want to use one of their libraries, you just have to be somehow affiliated with Harvard and be able to prove it.
It just so happens that Widener has the strictest policy for visitors. It is "a research institution for the use of Harvard students, faculty, staff, and visiting researchers, and is not open for public visitation or tours by individuals not affiliated with the University."
If you are one of the following:
a) a Harvard Alumni
b) a faculty member at another institution
c) a doctoral student at Harvard
You are allowed in Widener. Your access is varied depending on your status (ie, alums can only use the Reading Room but not the stacks).
If you are d) EVERYONE ELSE you have to apply for visiting privileges. Even if you are a doctoral candidate at another school, you still have to apply. These visiting privileges are for six days total for a twelve month period. To obtain visiting privileges, you must present a letter to the Library Privileges Office from the reference librarian of their university or Boston metropolitan public library stating that the specific library materials needed are not available elsewhere.
Let's review for a second: I AM APPLYING TO GET ACCESS TO ONE OF THE MOST SUPER-STRICT OF LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED STATES.
The other one is Harvard's Widener Library.
Harvard has a lot of libraries. They all seem awfully specific. Some are more strict than others, but overall the general rule is that if you want to use one of their libraries, you just have to be somehow affiliated with Harvard and be able to prove it.
It just so happens that Widener has the strictest policy for visitors. It is "a research institution for the use of Harvard students, faculty, staff, and visiting researchers, and is not open for public visitation or tours by individuals not affiliated with the University."
If you are one of the following:
a) a Harvard Alumni
b) a faculty member at another institution
c) a doctoral student at Harvard
You are allowed in Widener. Your access is varied depending on your status (ie, alums can only use the Reading Room but not the stacks).
If you are d) EVERYONE ELSE you have to apply for visiting privileges. Even if you are a doctoral candidate at another school, you still have to apply. These visiting privileges are for six days total for a twelve month period. To obtain visiting privileges, you must present a letter to the Library Privileges Office from the reference librarian of their university or Boston metropolitan public library stating that the specific library materials needed are not available elsewhere.
Let's review for a second: I AM APPLYING TO GET ACCESS TO ONE OF THE MOST SUPER-STRICT OF LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED STATES.
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