Head Tale

I was over at the UCC this morning for a meeting and there happened to be a trade fair on for various grad studies programs, both at UWO and with displays from other universities as well. 

I stopped at the FIMS booth to chat with Rosanne Greene, our Grad Student Services coordinator and ended up drawing on my extensive background in trade shows to answer one student's questions while Rosanne was busy talking to someone else.  I was telling the student about the three in-takes that FIMS has (a unique feature out of all the library schools in Canada) and she asked if there were any advantages to starting at any of them.  I said there weren't really (and that's basically true) but on the walk home, I started thinking about it a bit more and realised there are a few.

Winter (January)
Since this is when I started, this is obviously the best time to come to FIMS!  But seriously, it wasn't a conscious decision to start in January – I'd been thinking about applying to library school since two days after I got my undergrad English degree ten years ago – this was just how my timeline worked out when I did decide to apply for real.  One advantage when you start in January that might matter to some people is that you do an actual calendar year and it's nice to finish right at Christmas rather than having to come back after the holidays (you get a break between all semesters but most people like to go home for Christmas and if you're here from a distance, there's an extra expense involved to do this.  Put a different way, coming in January gave me no reason to go home through the entire year but if I was here over Christmas, I probably would've gone back to Saskatchewan at that break.) 

[2007-01-15 – One big disadvantage if you finish at Christmas, is that Christmas/New Year's is probably one of the slowest times for new job postings so you might not have as many places to apply right away compared to convocating at other times of the year.]

Summer (May)
One of the big advantages to starting in summer is that you basically have the run of campus since the undergrad and some other grad programs aren't running so it's just a nice, relaxing atmosphere to start an otherwise very intensive program.  A disadvantage, in terms of timelines, is that Children's Lit is only offered in summer so if you start in summer and either finish in a year or go off on co-op the following summer, you won't have the opportunity to take this course.  (That can happen in any term – there is no official schedule of when some classes are offered but some tend to come up only during certain semesters so it's nice to be aware of that if it's something you're really interested in and don't want to miss.) 

Fall (Sept)
This is the big in-take of the year where they take in ~80 students as oppposed to ~40 students in winter and summer.  This has both advantages and disadvantages.  You have the opportunity to meet a lot more people and build what will be a lifelong connection with them via the “boot camp” that is your first semester.  But since the fall cohort is split in two groups, you sometimes have to make more of an effort to get to know people in the other section.  A related issue is that you'll have different profs and possibly different assignments in each section even though each group is taking the same required classes.  This can lead to a situation where some classes are seen to be “easier” than the other section's or some professors as better for one section than whoever is teaching the other section.  This is in comparison to the other two in-takes when all new students are in the same boat in terms of assignments and professors. 

In-take Profiles
I guess the other thing to think about is if there's a “profile” of the people that tend to start at different times of the year.  Based on a very short, statistically insignificant observation (ie.) never really keeping track of exactly when the people ahead of me that I knew started and only really knowing the two in-takes that came after me) here are some gross generalizations…

Again, I'm completely biased to my own January cohort but I found our group to be a very sharing, very open, very friendly, very active group.  I would never go so far as to say that we were better than any other cohort that came before or after of course but you can read in your own subtext…  (If it matters, the grapevine reports that some professors have reported the same thing.)

The summer group seemed to be a bit more of a mixed bag in terms of personality types – they're a bit more competitive, a bit more extroverted on balance compared to my group. 

I found this fall term to be a youngish group, perhaps because a lot of people finished undergrad, worked a summer job then came directly to library school?  They appear to be an incredibly active bunch – they had 27 (!) people show up for the initial CLA student chapter meeting, they 've got a big number involved in Libraries Without Borders which almost seemed to be hanging by a thread after some of the principles in founding it had graduated.  They took the initiative to do their own sweatshirt sales when Student Council couldn't justify doing this as part of our own merchandise sales (we did our own t-shirts but not in first term and not with an open offer extended to the rest of the program if anybody else wanted to buy from them.)

I don't know – every class is going to have a mix of younger and older people, people from Ontario and people from away (both other parts of Canada and other countries),    quiet people and outgoing people, people who don't want to cause ripples and people who cause lots.  There's a bit of a running joke that for every 40 people or so taken in, there will be one incredibly eccentric or unique person so it's always fun trying to pick out who that person may be in each cohort. 

One of the (inadvertent?) benefits for the whole program and the way that it's structured with the accelerate
d option, the three intake times and the co-op program (all unique in Canada I believe) is that it attracts people from all over the country with all types of backgrounds who have a full range of library interests whereas some of the other schools tend to be known for a certain thing (Dalhousie is a very management focused school, I get the impression that U of T is very tech-orientated and so on) and also that otherwise, schools basically tend to attract mostly people from their own region rather than equal balance from across Canada. 

So, in answer to the question, “when in the best time to start library school?”, I'd say the main answer is “if you're thinking about it seriously, do it as soon as you can.” 

I don't regret my time in the work world at all (and realise how it's helped to make this program a bit easier for me than it has been for many of my colleagues) but I also can't help but envy some of my 22 and 25 year old classmates who are going to have nearly a decade more time to work in libraries once we all get out there…unless I work until I'm 82, which given the state of my student loans and the big hit Shea and I took the other day due to that new tax on income trusts, is a distinct possibility.