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Sep. 24th, 2007 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pearwaldorfOrientation for MLIS program today. Learned that apparently UW is the 16th best university in the world and the Information School admitted only 42% of the applicants this year, which is insanely low for an MLIS program. Grouped into get-to-know-you groups by sticker (I was in the dinosaur group). Brain all squeezy-outed. Met lots of cool people (including the son of the guy who invented Talk Like a Pirate Day), reveled in atmosphere where extreme nerdery is not only tolerated, but encouraged. There was a very "My people! I've missed you!" atmosphere at times, because who else would understand your desire to organize and classify and develop taxonomies, and go "Oh my god I've done that too!"? (I have a colleague who is also in the MLIS program who told me when he was younger, he made spreadsheets comparing and contrasting characteristics of the original Charlie's Angels. Sometimes, I think our draw towards all this stuff is a less-than-subconscious way of trying to make sense of our worlds.)
It was awesome and also terrifying, because gigantic new vistas of possibility have opened up in front of me. I can do damn near anything with this degree that involves information, but I don't know what yet. I'm leaning towards information organization and retrieval (there's probably a more technical term for it, but I don't know what it is), possibly in a corporate setting, but I want to do work on information policy/freedom (note to self: investigate taking courses at Evans School) and people's attitudes towards information too! So many possibilities and I don't know how to narrow it down! As one of the second years put it, finding out you can't do everything you're interested in is one of the hardest things to accept.
Mostly unrelated, but those $100 (not quite so cheap anymore now that materials prices are going up) laptops are becoming available to the public. $399 gets you one, and one to a child in some developing country. I kind of want one, if only for the wifi access. It would be a great little Internet machine, and you could probably do some interesting programming/hacky things on it. Too bad I don't have $399 to spare.
It was awesome and also terrifying, because gigantic new vistas of possibility have opened up in front of me. I can do damn near anything with this degree that involves information, but I don't know what yet. I'm leaning towards information organization and retrieval (there's probably a more technical term for it, but I don't know what it is), possibly in a corporate setting, but I want to do work on information policy/freedom (note to self: investigate taking courses at Evans School) and people's attitudes towards information too! So many possibilities and I don't know how to narrow it down! As one of the second years put it, finding out you can't do everything you're interested in is one of the hardest things to accept.
Mostly unrelated, but those $100 (not quite so cheap anymore now that materials prices are going up) laptops are becoming available to the public. $399 gets you one, and one to a child in some developing country. I kind of want one, if only for the wifi access. It would be a great little Internet machine, and you could probably do some interesting programming/hacky things on it. Too bad I don't have $399 to spare.
