Rediscovering the Stacks

Today was what I felt to be my first "real" day at Fellowship Institute. People are still trickling in, but today I met three of the people I'll be sharing the next year with. Good news: they all seem like wonderful folks. Two are pre-tenure women about my age (give or take a couple of years), and I'm excited about getting to know them better.

I'm also getting my office set up. Fellowship Institute just moved to a different building while the old one is being rehabbed, which means that our offices are freshly-painted, freshly-carpeted, and in lovely condition. By happy chance, mine is the largest of all the fellows' offices; I have dubbed it "the Ballroom" (Okay, it's not that big, but it is easily 50% larger than my shared office at Job University).

And, I went to the library.

Remember when you were an undergrad, and you did your bibliographic research by finding one book on the subject you were researching, then went to that place in the stacks and looked at the entire shelf around it, eventually clearing out half a dozen books that you never knew existed? Well, I did a modified version of that today. I discovered books roughly on my research topic that I never would have run across otherwise. And I was delighted to rediscover the joys of browsing. Because Job University serves a primarily undergraduate population, one is less likely to run across such things. I had forgotten how much I liked this aspect of research.

The stacks at Fellowship University are vast and in places creepy, but right now, I feel like I could spend hours and hours there.