UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor || Featuring Roderic Crooks (UCLA)

SAA @ UCLA presents “UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor.” The Fields of Endeavor series introduces UCLA Library and Information Studies program graduates and current interns who are out in the field taking knowledge learned in the program and putting it to use! We are pleased to feature UCLA IS PhD candidate, Roderic Crooks.

Name: Roderic Crooks
Graduation Year: 2011
MLIS Focus: Informatics

PhD Anticipated Graduation Year: 2015
Area of Research: I study with Professor Blanchette. I’ve been working mainly on ideas around social media and mobile computing. I also look at privacy, participation, record-keeping  personal digital archiving, and community archives. Like most of the doctoral students in IS, I have a main focus that I’m working through and then a few other projects that may or may not turn out to be related.

What led you to pursue a  higher degree with the  UCLA IS Department?
I taught English for a few years, mostly in community colleges, mostly in New York City. I loved teaching, but being relatively low on the academic totem pole, I didn’t feel like I had much control over what I was teaching. I often felt I was being helpful to students in spite of the curriculum, when I was helpful at all. I met a few really active librarians who showed me ways to encourage intellectual independence and curiosity in students and I realized I wanted to put my efforts into research and into institutions like the library. The thing that drew me to UCLA was the explicit commitment to social justice.

Describe your daily schedule:
It varies wildly. The hardest part of being a doctoral student is that your time, energy, and concentration are pulled in many incommensurable directions at once. In a given week I go to classes, read, work on publications, prepare for qualifying exams (mostly by reading), work at my job on campus, maybe grade papers if I’m a reader that quarter, meet with my advisor, meet with other people for research projects, do desk research, and try to complete administrative work related to the department. Also, go back through that sentence and insert the word “read” in between each list item. We do a lot of reading in this program.