Liberal Studies This Week

Creating an LIS degree plan can be a daunting process. Students must balance requirements and Boyer categories and the resulting process can seem like putting together a jigsaw puzzle of polar bears on a snowy day. It need not be that hard. Yes, there are dozens of decisions to make but this doesn't mean you have to worry about every decision. Here is how I would create an LIS degree plan.

When you start the degree planning process, you will have covered all 8 Boyer categories and should have a fairly good idea of what each entails and how it might fit into your academic planning. I'm not going to suggest that you forget all of this, but I would suggest that you put Boyer on the back burner as you start the process.

Degree plans include requirements, courses that you consider vital to your personal academic goals, and classes that may not be as important to your personal goals,but which are still necessary to meet our degree requirements. If I were creating a degree plan, I would address these three types of courses in order.

First, list all of the classes you need to take: LIS 301, LIS 451, an LIS program elective, ECCE, General Education courses (if you still need them.) There are some options to consider but you can't get away from these classes - they're required so write them down first.

Second, list the courses you really want to take and that you feel are important to you personally. This might take some research to identify your options but this should be the fun part of your planning. Hopefully you'll be able to fit all of these courses in your degree but they are a lower priority than the must-have requriements.

Once you have these two lists created, pull Boyer off of the back burner and consider how the classes you've listed fit into the eight categories and assign a Boyer category to each of them. If you've chosen the LIS program correctly (meaning you truly want an interdisciplinary degree)then your list of requirements and important classes will likely cover most of the Boyer categories.

If you've covered 6 of the Boyer categories without even considering Boyer when you developed your lists, then it's like having the jigsaw puzzle 80% completed before you start working on it. This way, you can worry about the 2 Boyer categories that didn't fall naturally into your plan rather than worrying about each of the dozens of decisions required by the planning process.