Published: October 14, 2024 by Gabe Farmer

The San José State University iSchool provides students with a cornucopia of resources to help steer our course through our chosen programs. However, the iSchool Student Resources page provides a whopping 124 links to various resources in just one webpage. My goal in this post is to provide a pragmatic and digestible guide to some of the most commonly used student resources.

Meet our New Students, the Sanderson Sisters

To illustrate just how useful some of these resources can be, we’re going to follow three new iSchool Students as they navigate through their first semester. The Sanderson sisters come from the town of Salem, Massachusetts where they have lived relatively simple lives in their cottage in the woods. Having recently found themselves with a desire for change and some extra time on their hands, the sisters have decided to pursue graduate studies at the illustrious San José State University iSchool! 

Winifred, the eldest sister, is obsessed with historical books and relics, so she has joined the MARA program hoping to glean ancient knowledge by exploring old records. Sarah loves to captivate an audience, so she joined the MLIS program with the aim of becoming a children’s librarian. The last sister, Mary, is skilled at sniffing out information, so she has chosen to delve into the Informatics program to bolster her data collection and interpretation skills. 

iSchool Advising

Winifred, Sarah and Mary successfully applied for and were accepted into each of their chosen programs, but they are at a complete loss when it comes to planning out the right course roadmap for their studies. Luckily, the iSchool provides an Advising Toolkit! 

The advising toolkit offers a plethora of useful tools, but let’s look at some of the ones that the sisters found particularly useful. They decide that a good place for each of them to start is with the course load and curriculum pages. The MLIS Course Load, INFM Course Load and MARA Curriculum pages provide useful examples of what they may expect between now and graduation. These pages provide a glimpse into what course loads may look like when selecting a timeline to complete a program in.

Unit Planning Tool

Having viewed the course load pages, Sarah and Mary decide they want to complete their programs in a three-year time frame, but Winifred, being the industrious eldest sister, wants to cut her timeline down to just two years. Unfortunately, math isn’t a Sanderson sister strong suit. Thanks to the Unit Planning Tool, they don’t need to worry, though.

By filling out the Unit Planning Tool, they can each receive personalized feedback about their plans. Staff from the iSchool Student Services team will respond with guidance and suggestions to get them started on a personal roadmap through each of their programs. The best part is that they can return to this tool at any point in their SJSU studies to confirm or adjust their progress!

Faculty Advisors

With the Unit Planning Tool, Mary and Winifred have begun setting up their personal roadmaps, but Sarah is still having a bit of a hard time. She is more of a people person, and all this talk of maps, courses, competencies and math is throwing her for a loop. While browsing through the Advising Toolkit, she is delighted to learn that there are faculty advisors who she can reach out to for a little more guidance! 

Knowing she wants to focus on becoming a Teacher Librarian, Sarah reaches out to faculty advisor Jonathan Hunt, who specializes in just that, and he helps her get started down the right path. There are faculty advisors available for all kinds of specializations as well as general advisors for students who haven’t decided on a specific path. You can find a full list of faculty advisors and their specializations on the faculty advisor webpage.

Competencies, Schedules and Syllabi, Oh My!

While the sisters found these assets the most useful for now, the Advising Toolkit is bursting at the seams with other resources such as:

• a tool to match MLIS courses with required MLIS Competencies
• a view of iSchool class schedules
• and even access to course syllabi. 

Knowing these tools will be useful throughout the entirety of their studies at the iSchool, the sisters make sure to bookmark the Advising Toolkit and make note of it in their spell books.

Financial Aid and Scholarships

Unfortunately for the sisters, the shilling is no longer an accepted US currency. Even worse, the bursar’s office foolishly refused to accept their offer of love potions in lieu of cash. Like many other iSchool students, they are going to need some financial aid or scholarships to pay for their studies. 

The good news is that the SJSU iSchool Financial Aid and Scholarships webpage has ample resources for new and current students. 

While all three sisters apply for the new student scholarships, only Mary is able to sniff her way into receiving one. Winifred and Sarah discuss potentially hexing the scholarship committee, but cooler heads prevail and they choose to get in contact with the SJSU Financial Aid Office. The kind folks there help Winifred and Sarah find the financial aid they need and no one gets turned into a toad–an absolute win-win!

Technology Assistance

Mary has never used a computer in her life, much less an information database like the ones she is bound to encounter in her Informatics courses. This is where SJSU’s iSchool Technology Support comes to the rescue. 

Technology Support provides resources for everything from setting up your home computing environment and downloading software to understanding the learning platform, Canvas, and using the database management system, Caspio. 

Mary needs a lot of help, so she utilizes the live chat function to have a student services team member walk her through some of the more intricate details of getting prepared for online learning. With their help, Mary gets logged into Zoom, and the sisters are startled to find that a tiny human has been imprisoned by their computer screen.

Zoom Assistance

After a few minutes of reassuring the sisters that no one is trapped inside their computer, the student services team member—comfortably seated at her own computer hundreds of miles away—explains that Zoom will play a key role in their learning experience.

Zoom is used to meet with classmates and attend lectures, conferences and student groups. It may even be used to record presentations for some class assignments. Like many iSchool students, the sisters know very little about how to use Zoom, but, as you can guess by now, there is a link for that! SJSU iSchool provides an entire webpage full of links on setting up and using Zoom for online learning. 

There they learn how to set up recurring meetings, ensure their camera and microphone are working properly, and, perhaps most importantly, learn how to save and share their own Zoom recordings, an invaluable skill as they navigate the iSchool.

The Semester Begins

Now that the sisters have signed up for classes, paid for their courses and gotten their home learning technology set up, it is time for the semester to begin. The sisters have already excitedly crafted their self-introduction discussion posts, their cauldron is brewing a nice, hearty fall soup for them to enjoy while hard at work and their quills and parchment are ready and waiting. What setbacks and challenges will they face once they are in the thick of it? What student resources can they utilize to overcome those challenges?

Find out in part two of the sisters’ story next week!