My reflection of...

 My first year of graduate school! It was rough to start graduate school with a broken ankle on a knee scooter. But I also met some amazing people during my first semester and second semester. I have worked on group projects with people that became my closest friends. After my ankle fully healed I thought that meant that I would feel better here and that graduate school would become more fun and easier. I was not correct not even close! 

There are only 2 required classes for my program. The first one I had taken in person with a great professor who knew what she was doing and I have spoken with her since the class has ended. In the second required class, the first red flag for me was that she had never worked in a library let alone studied to become one, and was now teaching us about Library and Society. I mean most of the people in my major have never worked in a library which I don't mind but to stick us with a professor who has never worked in one was bold of the administration, to say the least! The second red flag to me was that she never wanted to teach a class! She admitted that she was forced to teach this class on top of research for her own publications because she was a post-doctoral employee. The third red flag was when we all presented our final group project. My group had picked censorship but we were constantly told to narrow our objective so we did to Public elementary school libraries and how censorships have impacted the collections and the employees working at the libraries. Then when it came to the last group presentation we saw that they had also chosen censorship but just read case studies around the topic. Which somehow made them get a higher score than my group. 

I feel these required classes shouldn't be dependent so heavily on the professors that teach them. There should be a more consistent structure for all professors to follow so we as the students are more likely to learn the same things vs right now where we could be learning about anything from NFTs to Taxonomy or Schemas. I am excited for my second year of graduate school especially now that I will be a TA for two different Gender and Women's studies (GWS) undergraduate classes as well as taking two more graduate-level GWS courses.