When I let it be known around the office back in 2006 that I was interested in going back to school, and that I’d targeted UNC’s SILS, an acquaintance introduced me to a friend of hers who had just gotten her MSLS degree from there. I think we talked in January or February and I …
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I’ve stopped updating my previous blog, Oddments of High Unimportance, after Google’s Blogger-bots thought I was a spam-blog and prevented me from making posts for about 2 weeks. They finally decided I was for real and basically republished the blog, adding a “9” to the first part of the URL. This has the charming side-effect …
The following notes are from a 1982 book by Daniel Cohen called “Re:thinking: How to Succeed by Learning How to Think.” (Bookfinder link — this book is WAY old, people!) It struck me at the time I read it, sometime in the mid-90’s, as a coherent summary of the mind literature extant in 1982 for …
Advice for the creative writer, yes. But the student? My manager is taking a summer class and his teacher told the class, “Don’t write down what I say. Write down what you feel about what I say.” Interesting advice for a note-taker who’s thinking about regurgitating the content for the next test. My reporting background …
Mark Hurst’s book Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload attacks a problem that, of all people, my Alexander Technique therapist mentioned to me today. She said that evolution has granted our bodies numerous ways to deal with few or no calories, but no way — except obesity — to deal …
…goes the old Yiddish proverb. And it works for the spring semester as well as for real life. Using a simple 1-inch binder and two sets of five tabs were fantastic in helping me organize my two classes’ syllabi, assignments, special handouts, and so on. I could carry it with me to work and school, …
I enjoyed reading Hal Varian’s paper How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time. It succinctly describes how to build a theoretical model for how a system may work, from getting the idea, to testing it out, to improving it. It requires you to have a little ambition and a little less ego. …
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At the Kilgour lectures, OCLC President Robert Jordan said some rather challenging things to the assembled SILS throng. As an MBA and business guy, he up front admitted that his ideas might rub people the wrong way (but then, so did Fred Kilgour’s). One of his ideas that stuck with me was his notion that, …
Continue reading “Advice for a Forty-Odder from a Twenty-Something”
Because, for whatever reason, I’m nervous about entering a world that plays according to different rules than the corporate one I’m used to, I’ve taken to reading and bookmarking a lot of “how to succeed in academia” articles. So as I come across good advice (or at least good advice for me), I’ll post it …
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