Voice of a Seasoned Professional

“I’m bringing you copies of articles weekly to help you build your files.” In my Intro to College Student Personnel course at the University of Maryland in 1999, our faculty member—a long-time scholar with tenure who had also led a full administrative career as a Vice President for Student Affairs—would roll her suitcase into class each week and dutifully pass out hard copies of that week’s relevant literature to eager master’s students. Skip forward a decade, and the idea of carting around several lateral file drawers worth of articles to a new office or job seemed ludicrous, so I tasked a work-study student with digitizing several hundred articles. These remain in a hard drive in my home office today, artifacts of a time when we couldn’t imagine how easily information would flow in the decades after.