After spending nearly five years teaching soldiers their job, I was ready to retire and move on, but I had discovered that I really enjoyed teaching adults and decided to become a History professor. The first step along that path is a Masters so I got started. My interests lay in ancient history and I majored in that. While I was working on that I got a contract to archive the probate records in Eastland County. The project took nearly a year and by the time it was done, I had effectively become an expert on Eastland County history and had a hundred ideas for a topic for my thesis. After working with my advisor it was approved that, even though all my coursework was related to ancient history, I would be allowed to write my thesis on the 1917 Ranger Oil Boom.
After coming to Ranger College Library I discovered that there was a lot more to librarianship than shelving books and decided that in order to be the best I could be at my job I needed a degree in Library Sciences. I started working here in October and in January I began working on my MLIS. Three years later it was completed with a project exploring community college libraries in Texas’ relationship with their communities. It has been a goal since I started working here to increase our community engagement and working on this project helped me discover ways other schools do it and consider what might work for us.
None of this is very exciting.
