Enrolling In My Last Quarter of Grad School

Words by Mary Priest
Illustration by Hye Jin Chung

As I clicked “enroll” on the last class that I’ll take for my MLIS program, it occurred to me that I’ve come a long way in the past couple years. The first time I clicked that button, I thought that I had signed up for a long career of sniffing old books and protecting World War One love letters. My core classes quickly introduced me to a wide range of ideas and theories that complicated such a simple view of the information science profession. “Do you really need a master’s degree for that?!” people ask me in amazement when I tell them what I’m in school for. I pause for a minute and consider my graduate career before answering.

During this pause, I first think to the beginning of the grad school process, when I received my acceptance letter. My brother and I were “wards of the court,” until a family member took guardianship of us. I struggled to be the first in my family to get a bachelor’s degree. I thought that UCLA surely wouldn’t accept a kid like me. But, they did. 

In Process highlights the activities, experiences, and insights of current archival studies students as they develop their own perspectives on issues, trends, and events in the field.

Despite being on deployment in the Middle East, my brother called me to yell his excited congratulations over the sound of helicopter blades. Although I was utterly overwhelmed and intimidated by the campus, the commute, and the all the details of getting registered, I made it to the first day of class at UCLA.

I then remember my first year: the pride I took in getting an A on my first grad school paper after writing about Doctor Who’s portrayal of archives. Next to cross my mind is a long string of class discussion topics: modes of knowledge production, diversity, classification structures, defining archives, ethics, long-term digital storage, design, compliancy, privacy, big data, arrangement and description, information access, users, standards. I remember the archivists in UCLA Special Collections who took the time to teach me how to write a proper, DACS-compliant finding aid. I think about how nervous I was at the internship fair and networking events, talking to people who worked at all of my favorite places in LA. I think of the call I got about my internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and how hard I worked to not crash my car while telling the supervisor that I wholeheartedly accepted.

Acceptance Letter. Photo courtesy of Mary Priest.

3-D Image of the surface of Mars displayed in a JPL hallway. Photo courtesy of Mary Priest.

I think of this year, with the events that I helped plan and tours that I’ve gone on. I remember the first time that someone was outwardly impressed with my work on a project or contribution to a discussion. I think of how my peers have taught me and how they have challenged my existing views of the world. I know most of the people in my program now and fill with excitement when I see their names in awards announcements or articles about their amazing projects. I have built a resumé of experiences and sense of confidence that I don’t think I could have gotten from any other program. In addition to all of this, I also have a keen awareness of the mild, yet, lingering panic about my portfolio presentation.

Though I’m gratified by of all of the accomplishments in program, I know that obstacles in the field are complex and situated within an elaborate, entangled infrastructure. I know that I’m still a baby in my career and I don’t have all of the answers (yet). What I do have is a solid understanding of the issues at hand and the moxie to make a career out of trying to address them. So now I snap out of my thoughts and respond to the question at hand, “yes, you really do need a master’s degree, and then some.”

Mary Priest is a future archivist and current graduate student in UCLA’s MLIS program, specializing in archival informatics, set to graduate this spring. She holds a Bachelor’s in English Literature from Cal State Northridge and Shakespeare is her homeboy. When she’s not busy with classes and/or celebrating awesome archival finds, she is gluttonously overstuffing her “to-read” shelf on Goodreads.