I am deeply grateful to the Syracuse University MLIS program for giving me the opportunity to pursue this degree. My undergraduate GPA, earned more than twenty years ago, did not fully represent the professional experience, growth, curiosity, and determination I had developed since college. I appreciate that the admissions committee considered the quality of my more recent work and recognized the skills and perspective I could bring to the program. The ability to apply without involving my current employer allowed me to begin exploring a future career change before I was ready to share those plans professionally. Throughout the program, I continued working full-time while balancing academic, parental, and community responsibilities. I expect to remain in my current career for some time as I thoughtfully prepare for an eventual transition into the library and information field.

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This program has taught me far more than I anticipated. My research, leadership, technology, instructional-design, and information-literacy skills have grown alongside a much deeper understanding of equity, accessibility, ethics, community engagement, and the responsibilities information professionals have to the people they serve. Across the five program learning outcomes, I learned to recognize systemic information inequalities, understand and collaborate with users and communities, design more equitable resources and services, manage projects responsibly, and approach information and technology with greater critical awareness.

Most importantly, this program helped me recognize that many of the interests and projects I had already pursued including local-history research, community advocacy, website development, and information preservation, were not disconnected hobbies. Together, they represent a developing professional identity centered on public librarianship and community archives. The technical and project-management skills developed throughout my career remain an important part of what I bring to librarianship, but this program has helped me understand how those skills can be combined with research, preservation, and public service to benefit my community.

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After graduation, I plan to continue developing my local-history websites and expanding them as accessible and sustainable public resources. This may include adding new research, digitizing and describing historical materials, improving source documentation, creating research guides, preserving community ephemera, and sharing histories that have been overlooked or difficult for the public to locate. I also hope to explore opportunities to support the Oakland Public Library’s Oakland History Center through volunteer work, research assistance, digitization, collection description, community outreach, or other projects that make local-history materials easier to discover and use. 

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Graduation does not feel like the end of this learning process. Instead it marks the beginning of a more intentional path toward work that brings together technology, research, public access, community partnership, and the preservation of local histories. Although the exact path may continue to develop, I now have a clearer understanding of the kind of information professional I hope to become and the ways I can contribute to the communities and histories that matter to me.