A fresh start

Hello and welcome to Catalogue de Qué? I decided to create this blog as a journal to document aspects of my upcoming studies. In September of this year I will once again become a student, after 13 years spent mostly away from any kind of academia.

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Old school studying in action

My chosen course is a Masters in the field of Information Science, a relatively new area for me which looks to be both interesting as a subject of study and useful in terms of job prospects. I have to fund my studies through working in my current job, so I’ll be doing the course via distance learning, which means it will take longer than would be usual (three years rather than one.) For this reason, it’ll be a different experience than my undergraduate studies all those years ago, and I’ll have far more responsibility for my own learning. I’ll be entering a new and strange world of things like Dublin Core, metadata, catalogues, subject indexes and ontologies.

As with all new beginnings, there’s always a small amount of doubt. Will this be right for me? Will it lead to an interesting job; a better future? In this case, I’m unsure exactly where it will ultimately take me, but clearly my hope is that it will lead to at least some of those things. What’s certain is that it’s the first step to a career change, which I’ve been in need of for a while now, so in that sense it’s definitely a step in the right direction. It’s also exciting to be moving into a new area of knowledge and to be back studying again, not just for its own sake but also as a passage towards a personal goal.

As you may have gleaned from its rather cryptic name, another focus of this blog will be various musings on matters European, with particular emphasis on Spain. Living in the UK, I’m somewhat on the edge of Europe. As a nation we’re not quite as fully engaged as those on the continent, both in terms of our people and our government, and there’s a great deal of negativity* about Europe in parts of the UK press and in popular opinion. My own view is very different, which will probably become apparent through my posts on here. Much of European history, food, culture and customs are fascinating, and, having experienced what you might call ‘local’ Spanish living first-hand, I think there are many good things to be learned from embracing a different way of life.

So, that encapsulates what this blog will be about. It’s perhaps a strange combination of topics and a bit of a niche area, but hopefully I’ll find plenty to fill it up with. It’ll certainly be a useful way for me to recap on my studies and the experience of studying and so perhaps make the task a little less daunting. Perhaps you’ll find some of it interesting or thought-provoking, which will be an added bonus. Please feel free to leave a comment or send me a message if you would like to. In the meantime, onwards…

 


*This is not the same kind of negativity which currently exists within continental Europe regarding some of the particular internal workings of the EU, and around which there is much debate within and between European countries. This Guardian article contains a good description of the differences between Euro-scepticism within the continent and in the UK.

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