T Minus One Year

Yesterday new faculty orientation began and I can not believe that a year ago I was sitting in their shoes.  The past year seems to have flown by. I know I keep saying that, but it really only seems like a few weeks ago that we packed up the UHaul and moved to Maryland.  

This year instead of attending all the faculty events, I am helping out with Freshman orientation. The library has teamed up with the tutoring center and center for academic success and developed a Jeopardy game to quiz the students on registration and study skills and using the library. As Alex(andra) Trebek, I get to host the sessions. It's really fun and the new students seem to be genuinely trying to ingest all the new information. I was thinking how fun it is and how I would volunteer to help next year when I realized that I won't be here next year for all this hullabaloo! No orientation, no new semester Towson chaos.  None of it.  It made me a little sad. 

Clock of the Berenguela Tower in Santiago de Compostela , Spain. Photo by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sanchez.

That said, I have so much to do and only one year to do it! I'm in Special Collections now and have decided to spend my last year in a hybrid position of part Special Collections and part Reference.  So, I'll continue to work on Special Collections projects, (i.e. Collection Development policy, tutorials, archival software implementation, digitization etc), along with my capstone oral history project. But, in about about a month, along with the SpecColl projects, I will also work desk shifts in Reference again and teach more library sessions.  I'd also like to work on getting a second publication submitted and presenting at one or two conferences, and my committee work is starting to present some interesting prospects for the coming months. So, I'm just sort of imagining that I'll blink and all of a sudden it will be August 2011 and I'll be reminiscing about what I did or did not manage to accomplish. If time travel were possible I'm not sure which way I would go -forward and see where I am or back and start over. Hmm. Not back, it was fun, but I want to keep doing.  But, forward? Maybe, just maybe.  I really wonder where I'll be.