Statement of Purpose
“Who in this room comes from a high school with a school librarian?” Less than half the room raises their hand. Interesting; not surprising. “When you have research questions, where do you go for information?” Google, of course, ChatGPT, not surprising, Wikipedia, sure, why not? No one mentions their libraries, no one mentions journals, or books (in any format) at all.
I stand in front of two companies of first-year college students at Massachusetts Maritime Academy in a mandatory (too few have yet discovered the religion exemption) Sunday evening lecture. That they are not 100% engaged hardly surprises me, their answers hardly differ from those that I receive when I speak with their peers. I am teaching them about Academy Library Resources. I use all the tools in my tool box and hope that they understand that what we offer is so much more than what they have even considered might be available to them. I get creative and start looking for metaphors for database platforms that might be more familiar to them–Streaming services! My metaphor lands but they choose to use resources more akin to a free service with ads than any of the premium content we have curated for them. They are ill-equipped but it is not their fault. I tell myself it is my responsibility that they do not leave the Academy without these skills. I know I need more tools to do so.
Looking out across the desks of uniformed students, my concerns are not just for them but for my academic community, my own community, and extending further. According to the New York Times front page article of September 26, 2025, “Students are Ill Prepared for College and Beyond,” students are performing lower in standardized tests than in the last three decades, they have lost their reading stamina and fewer students can read texts with any depth. I might pass this off as another alarmist piece generalizing data across too wide a swathe of students, if Faculty anecdotes did not support it. If my own experiences did not support it. The challenge is clear and I need to expand my skill set.
But let me take a step back, because as impassioned, as motivated as I am to bring these students from AI overviews at the top of Google to reliable, relevant, peer-reviewed and scholarly information and to make critical thinkers of them in a national climate that seemingly becomes more hostile to intellectual pursuits and higher education with each passing day, this is not the discussions I thought I would be having, even a year ago.
Travel back in time with me.
In June 1996, I graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a degree in English Literature. I dreamt of being a great writer, a world conjuror, a voice in genre fiction. I wish I could say I outgrew that but I never did, instead, I took a more realistic survey of the career landscape. I needed a parallel path. This path came not from my studies but from my part-time job at Clare T. Carney Library where I worked as a student worker; shelving books, working circulation shifts and picking up a few job skills. I had not considered librarianship as my future; now I can hardly look back and not see that the path was there all along. An opportunity at the Plymouth Public Library coincided with my personal reflection and I started working for them shortly after graduating, thankful to have a job. I wrote in my spare time. My employment encouraged me to take classes in library science culminating in an MLIS degree from Simmons University in May 2001. For me, this was a bright time full of optimism, at least for a few short months before not only were the illusions of our nation shattered but so were financial systems that supported the work. I was fortunate to have accepted a job as a Youth Services/Teen Librarian at the Beebe Library in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a job that still feels so pivotal to me. This position allowed me to explore both sides of myself, the new librarian able to help my young patrons gain research skills and to be creative in student/staff joint ventures including summer reading programs, book groups, theatre performances, and a literary magazine. Being able to teach and participate in both critical thinking and creative endeavors was holistic and rewarding.
In 2004, I had an opportunity to continue this work with a return to the Plymouth Public Library as a Youth Services Librarian. Now I was teaching early literacy skills to the smallest of our community up through the teen years. This spoke more to the creative side this time but never abandoning the critical side. I provided reference to the myriad questions of toddlers to teens. When I had an opportunity to become a manager at our branch, I accepted it. I switched gears, expanded my audience. Still, my work functioned at the nexus of critical and creative thinking. I created programs as varied as a history book group that continues to this day, writers groups for teens to adults, story times, fantasy events, DIY, exploratory symposiums on various topics, summer reading programs and anything I could design that connected my patrons with literature. I came to believe that one of the values of the public library was to connect readers to books via experiences rather than just collection development. It was no longer just the physical building and the collection but the actual experience of the library that mattered.
But my life was more than just my profession. At home my family was growing with two children and a business in IT and over time, the needs of the home began to outweigh the needs of the profession forcing me to adjust, to change, and ultimately to set aside my professional work to manage the business and the domestic sphere. I stayed connected with my library, working with them as a substitute and as a special projects librarian, I continued my volunteer work at a local museum, I wrote, completing books that spoke to systems that oppress us in fantastical settings. I raised an artist daughter with a BA in illustration. More challenging, I managed the education and care of my autistic son who threw three three-hour tantrums a day in 2011, who was nearly hospitalized after a series of escalating crises caused the end of his public school career. I taught him starting with mythology and used stories as bulwarks against his anxiety. I built a curriculum-for-one that was founded on his interests and then expanded to include all traditional school disciplines. I put an emphasis on reading and when he was ready, writing, then I brought in mathematics and science, then dove deep into the social sciences. Together we built his education from stories to self-lead, multi-platformed studies that saw him graduate a year ahead of his peers. It is no small accomplishment of patience, creativity, or perseverance that he started college this September and is now thriving.
In February 2023, I took a small, part-time job to help with household expenses but also to see whether there was still development for me in my previous career path. I began working again in Academia and have, in this environment, found a path to become Director of Library Services. The work we do here at Massachusetts Maritime Academy is outside what I imagined for myself but which is not so different from the work I have always done. Here, I have endeavored to bring all my skills from programming production, instructional design, reference, and my experience working with young people, be those of my home or those I have I had the pleasure of serving in libraries. I am endeavoring to create programming that supports the mission of the academy but also that offers opportunities for our students to explore creative aspects of themselves and which continue to connect them to literature and to literacy.
This is what brings me to my application to the Critical and Creative thinking Masters’ degree program at UMass Boston. I see myself as a creative and critical thinker and I see this program as a way of deepening my understanding of what that means in all aspects of myself and work. I am looking to explore the theory behind the practice and to no longer stay at the surface of that intersection of creative and critical roads but to dig deeply into this place and emerge again with powerful tools of change, empowerment, and strength to continue to do the work against all obstacles and to do it better than before. Pursuing this degree means having more tools available to me in service to my own creative aspirations, my love of life-long learning, and to all the students, staff, and faculty that I am very happy to serve in my professional capacity.
The Indru'shy'ev 