here we go again

A short (fewer than 500 words) personal statement about how your current and/or past academic and work experiences, including volunteer work, have influenced your ability to become a leader in the information professions.

Recent work and volunteer experiences have helped me rediscover my life-long passion for books. Encounters with diverse populations have helped me better understand educational systems, information use, and language and literacy development across the lifespan. Both have fueled my interest in helping the next generations navigate our burgeoning information stores and fostering in them a passion for literature.

For my undergraduate senior thesis, I wrote a section of a children’s novel, researched topics related to my plot, and reviewed children’s books that inspired my work. I also helped organize a reader’s response session in which local elementary students critiqued my work. I had the opportunity to reflect on children’s interests in and responses to literature, to work with others to organize literary discussions, and to collect and implement feedback from readers.

However, it was during my speech language pathology graduate studies that I first considered a library career. My fellow students’ preference for whatever was most easily available online over more specialized research tools amazed me. I became aware of the potential to misuse information that accompanies its immediate availability. I found that I was often more concerned about the correct handling of information for projects than about the information itself.

As a student clinician in this program, I also worked with children of various ages and abilities in a number of educational settings. I was able to counsel parents about their children’s speech and language development as well. These opportunities provided me with insight on language and literacy development and the contingent information needs of different populations. Furthermore, clinical practicum gave me the opportunity to comb public libraries for books to use in therapy. Reading and re-reading children’s literature, I became versed both in new titles and books I missed as a child.

(or, instead of big section in italics in that last paragraph: In addition to insight on language and literacy development and the contingent information needs of different populations, clinical practicum gave me the opportunity to comb public libraries for books to use in therapy. Which do you like better?)

My literacy and language development coursework in addition to my clinical practicum experiences inspired me to expand the reading program at my summer daycare job. I encouraged children to chart their own reading progress, selected books to read aloud, and experimented with storytelling techniques. By the end of the summer, children who had shown no interest in books were requesting favorites from the library. I was encouraged by my successful identification of a need and development of a program to help meet it.

To confirm my interest in libraries, I volunteered in a media center in a school for children with disabilities. There I explored collections management software and databases, as well as various classification systems. Drawing on this experience, I am currently, as a volunteer, developing a cataloguing system for a small collection of books belonging to a university student organization in Rouen, France.

I am confident the unparalleled learning environment and experiences offered by the Catholic University of America would develop the insight and confidence I have developed these past few years. I look forward to begin developing there the skills I will need to confront the challenges facing future generations’ effective pursuit of the facts of life and the truths of fiction.