Second Master’s Degree Obtained

My newest Alma Mater, San Jose State University

In December 2021, I officially finished my second master’s degree, the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree from San Jose State University (SJSU). It is a wonderful achievement because, in this program, I graduated with a 4.0 GPA while working full time in my current academic library. I never imagined that I would graduate with a second master’s, forget thinking that I would graduate with a second master’s degree with straight A’s while working full time.

The journey to an MLIS is an interesting one, here is a little of the story behind it. At an academic library, my job duties include marketing, outreach, photography, public relations, event planning, and a much longer laundry list of job duties. I planned an event several years ago in my academic library called, “The Living Library: Beyond Stereotypes,” with one of the librarians. In this event, we have guests talk about their unique journey called “books,” and the event attendees were called “readers.” We invited many faculty and staff on the campus with amazing stories to become books for the event. Near the end of the day, as the event was winding down, I heard a story from my interim dean. Her story inspired me so much that the Friday after the event, I applied for library school at SJSU.

Since then, I have been balancing my regular life with going to school at SJSU. Of course, the wrench came about in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit everything. While it did not affect school that much since the program was online, the difficulty was transitioning my work to virtual work while not compromising our library outreach and events. After a rocky start, we transitioned to remote work.

My last two classes in the MLIS program were the portfolio review and an HTML/CSS/JavaScript class. I finished the portfolio review within the first three weeks of school because I spent all summer working on the program's core competencies, literature review, and evidence of work. It totaled around 130 pages single-spaced, and I did some modifications to get all of it approved for the portfolio review. The other class was the website class, which taught us basic and intermediate website coding. I did a lot of fun projects like a fake human-hating penguin nonprofit, a fake for-profit university, and a fake anime convention for the final project. The irony is not lost of me that blogger uses a lot of old HTML and fails the HTML and CSS tests big time. Hopefully, Google updates blogger, so it fits compliance.

The journey as a library school student ends successfully, what will I do in the future? Check this website to find out!