For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a new beginning.
—T. S. Eliot
When I entered the huge, heavy doors of the Castle, the crowning glory, with reason, of our small, suburban campus, I felt the excitement—it was palpable. It was “Thesis Week” at our university, a weeklong celebration and culmination of final senior projects proudly, and sometimes anxiously and worriedly, presented to the campus community, family, and friends. It is what we all wait for and what graduating seniors look forward to as it signals both an end and a beginning for all of us.
Through the doors I could hear happily raised voices, the persistent “thrum” of the excitement that everyone felt before the start of the Senior Thesis presentations. I had arrived just a tad early, though most of the seats were taken. I sat in the back, near a table full of fancy snacks and cold beverages for the audience. The English department faculty, all in attendance, sat together, waved, and alternately mouthed “good luck” to students, who were dressed in the clothes of the professionals they were on the verge of becoming. I have been on this campus for quite some time now, and yet I have never tired of this tradition, this showcasing of such hard work and the culmination of knowledge and the feeling of esprit de corps that we very clearly all felt.
But as I looked back to January, after the welcome and needed holiday stretch, it all looked and felt so different. Students came back to campus, glad to have the fall semester behind them, but anxious, to say the least, of the fact that their final drafts for the thesis were due the second week in March. Class was finished, and we would no longer be meeting as a group, and in so many ways, this was when the hard work, for me, and the students really began. With drafts in hand, copiously marked up by their professors, much to their dismay, they began, one by one, making appointments with me. There were some days when it was difficult to get through to students who clung to inappropriate sources or not fully realized assertions, because they were mentally fatigued at even the thought of any changes, let alone major ones in a paper that they thought they had already worked far too long on. They had head colds, then I had chest colds, they cried, had mini-meltdowns, crises of confidence; they simply just wanted to be done already and were sick and tired of the subject matter. There were a few, but just a few, who did not have to make many changes. I assured them that this was all part of the process, knowing all the while that they just would not understand until it was over; then they really would not even be able to remember what they’d just gone through!
Finally, the appointments slowed down as students began to find a rhythm in the revision process—a crucial element in the writing of a final project and the opportunity, as I continuously told them, to literally “revision” the paper—to look at it with fresh eyes. For the most part, I realized that much of the major information searching was done. The few who were given feedback on a new direction for their papers needed to start the search over for appropriate research, and others needed a variety of different things, but I think, no, I know that the majority of them needed emotional support through the process. Without class as the glue that held us together, many students expressed a feeling akin to “free fall” —the feeling that they were well and truly on their own and alone in the process of finalizing their paper. And it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the reason I find embedded librarianship so valuable is because I can fully support students both in and out of the classroom with a continuity that is seamless: that I can faithfully see them through the very beginning of the process right to the very end. It is, in my opinion, a privileged and unique position from which to work.
Instinctively, I had never been a proponent of the one-shot instruction class, and as an academic librarian had struggled consistently with a practice that seemed to fit many faculty members’ ideas of what was “enough” instruction for a class. That left me with the feeling that I never was in the position to see the educational life cycle; that I was almost always meeting students at the same developmental stage and could not see what happened before or after that stage.
As I sat in the ornate room with the bright lights, among all of the people who had invested in my students’ success—parents, friends, and family—I thought how multilayered the process really is. That these students had lives beyond the one that I saw on campus and in the classroom; they had people who loved them and were cheering them on. The benefit of being close, being there during the struggle and during the celebration is that we can see the student as a whole person, holistically, which renews and reaffirms our place in the educational ecosystem.
One by one the students took the podium, looked out upon a sea of friendly faces, and began to hold forth on the topics they’d been working on assiduously for months on end. Some took deep breaths. Some faltered, at the beginning, but then gained equilibrium and flow. The one student who said, in near tears, “I can’t do this,” did just that.
The president of the university, a tall and regal woman, sat beside me, her chin tilted upward over the many heads in front of us. She was smiling broadly, especially when one of the students presented her thesis on the Wizard of Oz. Later, it was said, she mentioned to someone that it was one of her favorite presentations that week and I remembered how she adjusted her skirt and leaned in to hear better. I passed that on to Megan, the student who presented, and she beamed.
The celebratory bottles of champagne for the students were opened at the end, to great applause. This is a tradition that marks the formal end of all thesis requirements. One student who struggled desperately during the year, with her two sons beside her, had tears in her eyes as she embraced me. “I really did it,” she said, almost unbelievably, then: “Thank you for believing in me!”
I slipped away with the celebration in full swing. My job with these students was complete and I was already looking to the next group. As I summed up my own experiences I asked myself a question:
Can students live without us?
My answer was: Probably.
Emboldened by my own honesty, I asked another:
Are they, their work, and their experience better for our involvement in the life cycle of the educational process?
That answer was easy and came readily to mind: Most definitely, yes.