Accepted!

I just got my letter of acceptance to the Computer Science department, and not a moment too soon. I had tried to change my classes earlier this month, but a Hold had been placed on my account. It demanded that, as a new student, I accept admissions before enrolling in any classes. Problem was, the offer of admission hadn't made it into the system yet, and I couldn't. Fortunately, Sue Ryan at the grad school was able to clear everything up with a few clicks.

So, now I'm taking the following:

CSC 305 - Software Engineering: This course is one of the ones I had hoped to challenge or drop, since none of my graduate courses have it as a pre-requisite, and I don't plan on doing any software development in my Information Science career. However, now that I've started reading the text, I can see where the concepts could be applied to web design projects and other information systems. This may prove very valuable for building my team to help improve cataloging.

CSC 412 - Operating Systems and Networks: Apparently, I'll be implementing my own OS in this course... scary, but it should have me well prepared to make the switch to Linux, and to work with Unix webservers. Plus, more group work, so I have another place to apply my 305 knowledge.

CSC 536 - Special Topics in Database Management Systems: This is actually an independent study with just me and Dr. Peckham. I'm hoping to cover XML as a database language, learning more about Object Oriented database systems, as well as XML and all its related technologies (XML Schema, XSL, XPath, XQuery, XLink, XPointer, XForm, etc. etc.) I'd like to learn enough to be able to rebuild part of my website as XML.

CSC 591 - Computer Science Seminar Series: This is required for graduation, and is only for 1 credit. I'm not sure at all what the topics covered will be, since there is no information about it anywhere on the CS website or in the course descriptions.


I haven't actually had any of these classes yet; one professor is injured, the other is in Central America. The seminar meets on Friday, and I have my first meeting with Dr. Peckham on Monday. So, for now, I'm mostly working on GA work (the GSLIS website is almost ready to be assembled). I have also been nominated as the SLA:RI webmaster; this was originally going to be a PFE, but with the 13 other credits, I had to drop it down to just being a professional activity. This frees me up some, but, of course, makes finding the time to do the job that much more difficult. I'll have longer to do it in, I reckon, but I still want to meet reasonable timetables.

In closing news, I was actually able to get all my books this semester through the library.