![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blogcutterToday's donation goes to the Carleton University student emergency fund, details here:
https://futurefunder.carleton.ca/giving-fund/2020-student-emergency-fund/
As I've indicated in previous posts, I really feel for students who have been deprived of a normal campus life due to Covid-19. And I have a long history of ties to the Carleton University community. I did my full-time undergraduate work there, studying French and German, during the early 1970s and later went back there part-time for a degree in Public Administration between 1988 and 1994. Since I retired in 2009, I've taken a number of interesting courses on a variety of topics through their Learning in Retirement programmes.
June 5 is a particularly significant date for me as well, because it was the starting date for an 8-week course in German that I took at the Goethe Institut in Schwåbisch Hall, West Germany, in the summer of 1972, exactly 48 years ago today. That was all made possible through a scholarship from the Canadian-German Academic Exchange Association and it was one of my first-year German professors from Carleton who recommended it to me and encouraged me to apply.
Two years later, the first full week of June 1974, I started a summer job contract with Multilingual Biblioservice (MBS), a division of the National Library, doing pre-cataloguing and English and French annotations for their collection of German-language materials that were destined for public library collections throughout Canada.
With these auspicious twists of fate, I realized I was steadily carving out a career path for myself. I loved the atmosphere at MBS and I was fascinated both by the reading material that I dealt with and by the cataloguing processes which were completely new to me. So after completing my Honours B.A. at Carleton, I decided to go for a Masters of Library Science at Western. That was life-changing as well, and led to a 33-year career in federal government libraries.
I hope that as the Coronavirus recedes and international travel resumes, today's postsecondary students will have opportunities to expand their horizons and carve out their futures just as I did. Many of the current cohort of undergraduates were born at the height of 9/11 hysteria when the routines and procedures of airports and international travel were irrevocably altered.
They used to say that Bell long distance was the next-best thing to being there. But I hope that once this pandemic passes, being there will still be a real possibility!
https://futurefunder.carleton.ca/giving-fund/2020-student-emergency-fund/
As I've indicated in previous posts, I really feel for students who have been deprived of a normal campus life due to Covid-19. And I have a long history of ties to the Carleton University community. I did my full-time undergraduate work there, studying French and German, during the early 1970s and later went back there part-time for a degree in Public Administration between 1988 and 1994. Since I retired in 2009, I've taken a number of interesting courses on a variety of topics through their Learning in Retirement programmes.
June 5 is a particularly significant date for me as well, because it was the starting date for an 8-week course in German that I took at the Goethe Institut in Schwåbisch Hall, West Germany, in the summer of 1972, exactly 48 years ago today. That was all made possible through a scholarship from the Canadian-German Academic Exchange Association and it was one of my first-year German professors from Carleton who recommended it to me and encouraged me to apply.
Two years later, the first full week of June 1974, I started a summer job contract with Multilingual Biblioservice (MBS), a division of the National Library, doing pre-cataloguing and English and French annotations for their collection of German-language materials that were destined for public library collections throughout Canada.
With these auspicious twists of fate, I realized I was steadily carving out a career path for myself. I loved the atmosphere at MBS and I was fascinated both by the reading material that I dealt with and by the cataloguing processes which were completely new to me. So after completing my Honours B.A. at Carleton, I decided to go for a Masters of Library Science at Western. That was life-changing as well, and led to a 33-year career in federal government libraries.
I hope that as the Coronavirus recedes and international travel resumes, today's postsecondary students will have opportunities to expand their horizons and carve out their futures just as I did. Many of the current cohort of undergraduates were born at the height of 9/11 hysteria when the routines and procedures of airports and international travel were irrevocably altered.
They used to say that Bell long distance was the next-best thing to being there. But I hope that once this pandemic passes, being there will still be a real possibility!
