Graduation is this weekend and another year is coming to close. Since the summer student count at my university is reduced to medical and dental students, librarians are heavily encouraged to take advantage of continuing education opportunities. We can pretty much follow our hearts and do whatever, as long as we can loosely justify it. It's one of my favorite things about my job. I also love, love the tuition stipends and benefits, but that's another story. This summer, I'm doing something a bit different and coming up with a formal list of goals and ambitions:
1.) Improve my public speaking. I know this will take much more than one workshop. I'm planning to join my local Toastmasters so I can practice regularly.
2.) Improve my business writing. I need to get to the point where I can quickly write up a memo, report, or development plan. The plan is a workshop, then writing every occasion I get.
3.) Become the queen of web tutorials. Screencast, Jing, YouTube, Blackboard--I'm supposed to come up with a whole web series of video tutorials for the Fall semester, so I'll have plenty of opportunity to work on my skills.
4.) Refresh my database expertise. A classic librarian skill, but I find that I always use the same medical databases and forget about everything else. Joining ALA and getting outside my bubble of medical librarianship exclusivity would also help.
5.) Budgeting and Fiscal Management. I can't pretend I get to even look at the budget in my current position, but a few of the professional organizations I hold memberships in have positions opening that might provide me with budgeting skills and responsibilities.
6.) Student Status. I was planning to take a break this summer from university, but I think I'm going to take 2 classes. I'm ready to knock out the coursework portion of my D.S.
7.) Health Disparities and Health Equity. My passion, and I'm super thrilled to have the opportunity to work for a university that makes combating disparities a part of it's mission, to be able to write up reports alongside a prestigious government agency, and to have it play such an instrumental role in my academic research. I'm excited about technology and information science and health and disparities, and that I'm in the unique position to do something big. I'm learning about power and how to affect change, about the huge, huge role of networking, and realizing how desperately underrepresented minorities are in agencies that affect change.
Of course, I have a few personal goals:
8.) Reconnect. I've been so disconnected from my friends and family this semester--everyone who isn't local pretty much got a cold shoulder the past five months. Yeah, I've been busy but I need to rectify that. I'm planning a major road trip this summer and I hope to see everyone.
9.) Spiritual Life. I want to make sure people see Christ living in me. I fail, sometimes super spectacularly, but I want to make sure I'm giving it my best shot. It means prayer in the mornings and before bed, meditating on a scripture twice a day, and having an accountability partner.
10.) Travel. Possible mission trip to Haiti, and I'm working on a grant where we've teamed up with researchers from Ghana. We're hoping to plan a visit!
Comments
Post a Comment