1/28/2008
Advising at SIRLS (link to general information)
A letter to my advisees
[How to address me: please address me as 'Martin', if you feel comfortable doing that.] My background My philosophy of education and advising A proviso to my advising How I can be reached Course selection Graduate school and interdisplinary work Internships Transfer units Questions that you shouldn't be surprised if I can't answer Questions that I usually provide input to Questions that I wish that I could answer better Mentoring What do I expect from you? The distance student and the sense of isolation Interviewing The LSO and Library jobs Conclusion
Dear advisees,
In common with all of the faculty in SIRLS, I have a large number of advisees. It is sometimes difficult to keep track of who you are, what you have written to me, and what I have replied to you. This document is to establish a common core of what I have said, or might say, to you.
My background
I was educated in Philosophy of Science, then became interested in, and started to teach, Automated Reasoning, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Aided Learning, and Computer Science. I have also written computer programs extensively, from about 1984 (you can see some of my programming work at http://SoftOption.Us). SIRLS recruited me principally because of my knowledge of computers and using computers to teach. They knew what was coming both for librarianship and for distance learning. Since I have been working at SIRLS I have developed an interest in various mainstream library and information science areas (like classification, information ethics, information architecture). Here is my CV.
My philosophy of education and advising
My philosophy of education... Well, briefly. I belong to that older school that sees education as being pursued by the pure love of a discipline. We want to understand. We relish intellectual challenge. We are engaged. Knowledge and wisdom are the ends we seek, and they are ends in themselves. We study Latin, we study Jane Austen, we study Algebra. This tradition of the love of knowledge, going back to the Ancient Greeks and further, is in a temporary hiatus. The employers have taken over and they have installed the commercialization of education. Education is a means to an end, and the end is not learning. The end is employment. Education shrinks away and transmogrifies into vocational training. Frederick Taylor and scientific management gives way to competencies, and it is the purpose of Universities (Universities of all places, not polytechnics, or technical colleges) to provide competencies and job skills. We are all working for the man.
Well, I am not working for the man. This causes a tension in advising. SIRLS, even though it is part of a Research 1 University, is a professional school. And our typical students are librarians, or are looking to be librarians, and they do want to acquire vocational training or something useful to get employment. The resolution is to make a distinction between 'first day ready' and 'future leaders of the information professions'. SIRLS does not produce, nor does it aim to produce, graduates who are first day ready. We don't teach 'library hand' (nor would we ever have done so)-- (fyi: library hand is that style of handwriting that librarians used to use to write call numbers and similar on the spines of books). But we do aim to give our graduates the intellectual curiosity, and the spirit of enquiry, to become leaders in the rapidly changing fields of librarianship and information science. I am comfortable advising students on this, and I think the advice I give is reasonable.
A proviso to my advising
I am more confident about giving you academic advice than I am in giving you vocational advice. I avoid the latter. I have never worked as a professional librarian. In fact, I have only ever worked as a professional academic (and in factories etc. to pay for my learning). This means I am not well placed, not suitably experienced, to answer students enquiries like 'at present I work in a public library, but I would like to work in an academic library, what should I do to facilitate such a transfer?'. However, there are plenty of people in and around SIRLS (Tom Wilding, Leslie Kent Kunkel, Cheryl Malone, Jana Bradley, etc. ) who have a wealth of practical working experience and knowledge. I usually suggest that my advisees use these other resources for vocational questions. Some vocational questions I feel reasonably comfortable with-- many of our students seek work outside typical mainstream information professional careers, and some of these areas I can discuss. Here's a rough rule of thumb: if your intended career has a fair bit to do with computers, computing, computer networks, or the Internet etc. there may be something useful I can say to you.
How I can be reached
My office is room 16 at SIRLS.
My office hours are a bit of a long story. I tend to do most, usually all, my teaching online and this tends to favor 'virtual' office hours. I make it a practice to run an AIM client with a Web camera whenever I am working online. This means that I am available for several hours each day for Instant Messaging, audio chat, or video-conferencing, often 7 days a week. My screen name is 'mfricke19'. You can get me on Skype as 'mfricke1947' and my office phone is 621 3491.
For face to face meetings, I usually go in to work every day in the mornings. And I will meet with anyone at, say, a day's notice by email. (We just need to be sure there is no conflict with committee meetings or other relatively inflexible demands on my time.) I do have listed office hours: Wednesday 9-11am, but students are usually better off making a specific appointment.
My email address is mfricke@u.arizona.edu I try to deal with email expeditiously, but I can have 600 emails in waiting (so this is a question of the art of the possible).
If you are in one of my d2l classes, and you want to communicate with me about that d2l class, use the course's internal email (this is best for me as it keeps material related to the course in one place). For instructions on using D2L internal email see: http://help.d2l.arizona.edu/StudentTools/email/emailTool.htm
There is a listserv for my advisees advicefricke@listserv.arizona.edu . You probably don't want to be sending messages to it unless you are wanting to hit all the advisees. It is more for me to send a message to all of you.
Course selection
See MA Curriculum Requirements for the current requirements for the degree. If the requirements change after you entered the program, you can choose to satisfy either the old requirements or the new ones (so-called 'grandparenting').In order to complete the degree, you have to complete 36 units overall. You have to do 4 specific Core Courses (504, 506, 515, and 520) and a single class from each of the four Distributed Electives categories. So, in a way, 24 of the units are pretty well chosen for you. Other things being equal, you should take the Core Courses as soon as possible. There are some qualifications:- you have to take 504 before you do other courses in SIRLS, 506 is hard for some students, 515 and 520 benefit from some experience in information matters. So it is reasonable to take any of these latter three further on in your education with SIRLS. You should stick to 500 level courses during your first semester in the program.
The rest of your coursework, the remaining 12 units, should be driven by your specific professional and/or academic goals. To see whether particular courses will further these goals, look at the syllabi and/or the old syllabi for the course. This will give you a good idea of the likely content of the course.
SIRLS has some suggested courses of study (on its advising page) depending on what area in IRLS you plan to focus on. You should take a look at these recommendations.
At certain stages of your degree, you will have to write a Plan of Study, and reflections of an ePortfolio. Some documents may come through to me for my approval, you are best to direct any of these through the Office (they know what needs to be done and will track the documents).
Graduate school and interdisciplinary work
There is another important factor (that is, other than your professional and/or academic goals) that you should consider when selecting courses.
The University of Arizona is a Research 1 University. Departments throughout the University are extremely strong academically, and SIRLS itself has faculty with considerable academic expertise.
The University of Arizona is a center of excellence, and this is an opportunity for you.
You will have a long time to hone the practical skills of your chosen profession, whatever that might be. Graduate school, however, is a unique opportunity to think about a number of the important issues that affect your chosen profession. You may never get another chance to reflect on these issues in such an extensive way.
With this in mind, you may want to take a number of classes at SIRLS simply because they give you a chance to explore some of these issues with an expert. For example, Professor Malone is an expert on library history. Professor Fallis is an expert on social epistemology. Professor Edgar is an expert on corporate libraries. Professor Cui is an expert on classification. And the other faculty have their areas of expertise. You might want to take advantage of the opportunity to take courses in these areas from these faculty even if you have no plans to specialize in these areas.
This point is true for courses offered outside SIRLS, so called 'interdisciplinary work'. We used to insist on a student take two 'outside' courses. This is no longer a requirement. But it has my strongest recommendation. Typical courses that would be suitable here include anything on ethnography from Anthropology or Womens Studies, courses on children's and young adult literature from Eduction or LRC, courses on computing from Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or Management Information Systems, etc.. Often students, who intend to be librarians, plan to be subject specialists; in which case they would do themselves a lot of good by studying outside courses like research methods in history (from the History department) or research methods in X (from the X department), where X is the area that the student is planning to be a subject specialist in. Sometimes some of these courses have pre-requisites, which may even be an undergraduate course or courses. It can be worthwhile to do the pre-requisites. If the graduate course is valuable enough, do whatever is needed.
You will have to get my approval on any outside courses that you want to count toward your degree. You will have to write me a paragraph explaining how the course or courses will further your professional and/or academic goals (in Information Resources and Library Science). The courses need to 'fit in'. I almost certainly will approve any of these courses. It is possible that I won't, but I cannot think of any plausible example where such a denial would occur.
Internships
Some time ago internships were supposed to be 'problem-oriented'. In other words, there had to be a specific 'field-based problem' (or problems) that you were going to try to solve (in the 135 hours). For instance, you might have been building a web site on a particular topic or you might have been organizing a particular segment of a library's collection. Mere work experience was not considered enough. An example of something that was not sufficiently 'problem-oriented' was the proposal that you were going to work at the reference desk for 135 hours. (Reference work might, however, have been be part of an acceptable internship proposal.).
Ideas on this have evolved. Nowadays internships are being looked after by Karen Holloway Bell khbell@email.arizona.edu , and she, and the student advisors (including me) liaise on what is acceptable.
There are a many internships regularly advertised (on IRLSADMIN) and elsewhere. If you want to devise one completely of your own, typically you need an onsite Supervisor (who eventually will certify that you have done what you are supposed to), and approval from Karen Bell and I.
Transfer units
These are tricky in that we need to satisfy the regulations. You should read http://www.sir.arizona.edu/program/masters/requirements/mastersReq06.htm#transfer . And here is part of that
"Students may transfer up to six credits of coursework taken outside of SIRLS into the program for presentation for graduation under the following limitations:
1) approval by the student’s faculty advisor in writing;
2) grades of B or better;
3) credits must be graduate level;
4) courses cannot be older than six years at the time of graduation and must be from an regionally accredited institution;
5) transfer courses cannot have been used for another degree; and
6) transfer courses will not be approved if SIRLS offers the same courses. "
If you have courses you intend to transfer, I will work with the Office to see everything is in order.
If the regulations are not satisfied, the Graduate College will toss out the courses when the student's documents arrive with them.
Questions that you shouldn't be surprised if I can't answer
I may not be able to answer some of your questions about the rules and procedures of SIRLS and the University of Arizona. In the past, this category has even included such seemingly basic questions as: How do I register for classes? How many internships can I do? How do I order my textbooks? Which classes do students usually take to satisfy the research methods requirement? Which browser should I use? (Actually, I can answer that last one: Firefox.)Very often, either you or I will have to search the SIRLS website or ask the SIRLS advising coordinator, in order to get the answers to such questions.
Both SIRLS, and the Graduate College, change regulations, and practices, reasonably often. I usually suggest the students get rulings on regulations directly from the source or authority (the Graduate College itself or the SIRLS office).
Questions that I usually provide input to
I have to make the final determination about the academic content of your program. So questions in this category include:
- Is course X acceptable interdisciplinary work? [I answer this one, almost always 'Yes']
- Can I transfer course Y from another institution? [I work with the Office over this, and we reach some joint view]
- Is such-and-such an acceptable internship project? [I work with the Karen Bell on this, and we reach some joint view]
Questions that I wish that I could answer better
A typical question in this category is: What sorts of preparations should I make in order to become a librarian of type X?This is the sort of question that you might reasonably want and expect a faculty advisor to be able to answer. However, given the limits on my knowledge of libraries, I may end up directing you to other faculty or alumni for more authoritative answers.
Mentoring
When you were admitted to the program, you may have received a University pamphlet on the 'mentoring' relationship between the faculty advisor and the graduate student. What is described in this pamphlet sounds a lot like the relationship that I had with my supervisor/advisor/mentor in graduate school. It was a very valuable relationship and is certainly the sort of thing that should be facilitated in graduate programs. However, there are some important differences between my graduate school situation and the situation that students at SIRLS face. As a result of these differences, it is not quite as likely (though not impossible) that such relationships will occur between students and faculty at SIRLS.First, my supervisor had about 4 graduate advisees at the time. (For comparison, I have 30+ at the moment.) Second, the career that I aspired to and the career that my advisor was pursuing were similar. He was an academic and I wanted to be an academic. As a result, he could tell me what to do. (I just do not have the same kind of hands-on experience with the kinds of careers that most of you aspire to.)
Given these circumstances, I see my role as advisor (that is, as guiding you through an academic program) and not usually as mentor. Only in a few cases will I have the ability (or the time) to be a true mentor.
In any case, a true mentor is not really something that can be 'assigned' to you. I think that you will find that most successful relationships of this sort require quite a bit of effort and searching.
What do I expect from you?
<I am still considering this> One point is: it may be of benefit to you to meet with me perhaps half way through your studies for your degree.
The distance student and the sense of isolation
The best correlated predictor of 'failure' for any student doing distance education is 'sense of isolation'. This immediately is a red-flag or reminder for us. I always used to have groupwork in my distance classes to build mini-communities as one counter (unfortunately students hate groupwork so I am wary of it these days). Our students are mature and they have such a buy-in (fees, time, etc.) that they are going to force themselves to succeed. However, this does not mean that they don't feel isolated. I am planning to have monthly video conferences (chat sessions with video) for my advisees. These are optional, of course. And it is a small gesture. But it might do some good.
Interviewing
Every once in a while, large libraries (often from back east) will send interviewers to SIRLS. If you really want to get a job in your chosen field somewhere sometime, then my advice is to sign up for such interviews (if you are on campus). You should do so even if you are not sure that you would want a job at this particular library.What if you don't want a job back east? It's good practice. (The fact that you sign up for an interview does not mean that you have to be anything less than honest about how likely it is that you would accept a job offer. They will still be happy to talk to you.) What if you are not about to finish your degree? It's still good practice. What if you do not have a resume ready? You should start preparing one. (In fact, they often take years to get right.)
LSO and the Library Professions
My one final piece of advice is that you should definitely consider joining the SIRLS Library Student Organization. In any event, you will want to consult the LSO handbook about the program and other matters. Here is a link to further advice on careers in the information professions.
Conclusion
I should point out that I am just your principal advisor. You are free to seek advice from any other faculty member. I still have to sign all the forms though.
[Let me know if anything in this document needs revision. ]
Sincerely,
Martin Frické
Associate Professor
School of Information Resources & Library Science
University of Arizona
1515 East First Street
Tucson, AZ 85719
mfricke@email.arizona.edu
