Friday night, before the start of a quick and fleeting (aren’t they all?) football weekend, I went to a GSLIS social event. This is significant … I’m basically doing grad school by myself. I don’t have any associations with people in the field or school, and introducing myself carte blanche to stangers isn’t one of my strong points. But, I went to a bar outside of my social circles, and met a bunch of other people there for happy hour.

Turned out to be a really great experience. I had a long discussion with one of the IS/interfaces professors, whom I know I’ll enteract with later academically, and probably professionally. I was impressed by him; out at a happy hour with students, and interested in listening to my ideas about technology and my impressions of LIS so far, and things us as CS/LIS people are doing right and wrong. I learned a few things, and hope I left a good impression on him. Part of it might have been drunken rambling (on my part most likely, maybe on his part — I don’t know him well enough to say.)

It’s tough completely reacclimating to student life, because IS is something I work in and study/experience every day. Yes, these are my professors and upper-classmen, but they’re also my colleagues. They have knowledge I don’t have, at least with terminology and history of the LIS field, but I have practical hands on experience with technology and the application of some of these pieces. I think that puts me in a unique, or at least rarer position than some of my other classmates. I worry that sometimes I presume too much of myself, and should take a humbler student approach.

And then Jeffe posts about inflated self-assessments and that’s been a strike to my self confidence. The post is funny to me because I took his class (for non UIUC-CS majors, that’s the CS theory class that is both the scariest and coolest thing you’ve ever seen. It is the class that fries your brain. It is the class whose topics or textbook you tout to non-CS people to revel in their horrified stares. It is the class that forces you to think outside normal considerations, and somehow logically argue how you got there and why it’s valid. It is the class that showed me if I can solve minesweeper (the demo game that comes with Windows,) in a logical way, I will have solved all of the impossible problems of the universe. They will all fold into one, and be answered, and the universe will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. Again. (With apologies to Douglas Adams.) Anyhow, “I don’t know.” I used that in his class.

The paper/pancakes blog post was a good, timely reminder that while I need to be critical and analytical and bring my wits to class with me, I need to be very open and understanding, and not overstep myself. If I err that way, it’s not because I’m arrogant or trying to show off, it’s that learning changes you. I feel my opinions on the readings and topics as they’re introduced to me bring a fresh perspective that maybe the teachers have long forgotten, and that I someday will forget, unless I get it out and talk about it now. I say stupid things because I want to be argued against. I think I know something about the topics, because in some ways I do, even if what I don’t realize yet is that bit of knowledge barely fills a thimble floating in the ocean.

I just hope I can do all that without making an ass of myself, both in class and socially.