I am now nearing the end of my internship. In my last post, I promised to make this one about the projects I am working on and the skills and tools I am using to execute them. If at any point this post begins to sound like an advertisement or glowing review of the Syracuse University School of Information Studies…it is.
There were many things that first drew me to this internship at the Smithsonian Institution – the focus on professional development, the rigorous and diverse set of projects, and that the work combined library and information science skills and information management skills. I am jointly pursuing a LIS and IM degree so getting an internship that had elements of each was critical.
Of all the courses I have taken in my year at the iSchool, the following four classes – in this order – have provided me with the skills, tools, and knowledge to execute the projects I am working on at the Smithsonian
- IST 659 Data Administration Concepts and Database Management (Bei Yu)
- From day one, I was writing SQL scripts to organize, manipulate, and extract data from entities with tens of thousands of records. This is not something for Excel. As nice as Excel is, and I do really like the software, it just does not have the engine to work nimbly with very large amounts of information. Aside from SQL, I was called on a couple times to explain theory and best practice in database design – all learned from Bei Yu and IST 659.
- IST 616 Information Resources: Organization and Access (Jian Qin)
- I have had to do a LOT of ordering and structuring of digital resources in this internship. Every day I have worked through the nature of information-based problems and how information systems address these problems, the concepts, principles, standards, and technologies of information organization, the human aspects of information organization, and how organized information affects information search/retrieval.
- IST 600 Information Design (Jaime Snyder)
- This course is a great companion to just about everything at the iSchool. It should be required, in my opinion. How did I use what I learned in Information Design at this internship? Primarily on a theoretical level and linked closely to the practicality of what I learned in 616, but also in designing the components of information-driven systems in my projects.
- IST 631 Enterprise Technologies (Dave Dischiave)
- More than once the enterprise technology concepts discussed in this class came up. After educating some senior (rank not age) staff members about virtualization and ‘scaling up’ versus ‘scaling down’, I was labeled as ‘the expert’. In the meetings and casual water cooler conversations following, I was asked regularly to weigh in on questions about enterprise technology issues a lot more than I anticipated, sometimes daily.
As you can see, there is both a mix of IM and LIS classes and their real world applications. There are also bits and pieces from other classes that I employed on a regular basis. The iSchool had me well prepared, to say the least. On a separate note, if anyone wonders about the credibility of the iSchool in the real world, I definitely got more than a handful of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ after telling new colleagues and staffers my academic affiliation.
It has been a great experience and I only regret that the internship does not run longer.
If you want to ask me any questions, please do not hesitate – my email is jkitlas@syr.edu or you can go to http://kitlas.com
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