Introducing Myself

Hello! My name is Lauren McPike and this is my final semester in the SLIS program! I started the program in the summer of 2008 and it's been a wild and crazy, but also fun and worthwhile two years.

I am currently working on the north side of Indianapolis as an admin at an executive suite of offices. What that means is that my company has an entire suite of offices and rents out the individual offices to different companies and I provide the receptionist/secretarial/administrative/technical support for all of them. At this time, I currently serve around 40 different companies and my work day is always an adventure. I can't say that I enjoy my job, but it does allow me to go to school without taking out student loans. So, in that respect, I am glad to have my job.

I am very excited for this course as I love to read, but I have a very strong tendency to only stay within certain genres and I need to expand my horizons. In fact, I've found that I mostly read non-fiction books and am not well-verse in fiction at all. I really love to read books about history and film studies. I do love mysteries, though, and am a huge Agatha Christie fan. Since I want to work in a public library, and particularly with retirees, I think I'm in deperate need of this class.

Just this month I started volunteering at Zionsville's Hussey-Mayfield Public Library to gain some experience working in a library. All of the librarians have been wonderful and have really taken an interest in helping me develop practical skills at the reference desk and with collection displays. As I get more comfortable, they are going to have me work with them on some of their projects, events, and classes as well. So, I'm really eager for that.

Between work, school, and volunteering, I don't have a whole lot of free time. In what little free time I do have, I work out, though I'm not a health nut, and watch movies. I am a movie nut. Just this last weekend I spent an hour organizing my movie collection and walked away thinking about all of the movies that I still don't own. I love movies from all genres, but my favorite is horror. Just this past weekend I had a little horror movie mini-marathon ranging from classics, such as Alien, to so-bad-they're-good ones, such as TerrorVision. I also have started doing a little freelance writing about movies for a friend's online magazine. He doesn't pay me for my essays, but I don't really care because I just do it for fun. Perhaps I'll end up at a library that will let me do some things with its film collection.

That's me in a nutshell. I look forward to meeting everyone face-to-face in class!