Commons Room
| A Slice of Campus Life |
Diploma.comFor Leah Ducato Rudolph, schoolwork must wait until long after she has returned from the Abington Community Library, where she works as a librarian. It must wait until after her family is fed, the dishes washed, and her husband is parked in front of the television. Only then, late in the evening, can Rudolph settle down at the kitchen table with her laptop and open the steady stream of documents that have been arriving all day from her professors and classmates at Pitt. Here’s one from a classmate in Maryland, a good cyber friend who is panicking about an upcoming presentation; here’s another, from a man in Nevada, who’s responding to a discussion that has been unfolding online for the last two weeks. And here’s a posting about the final exam from their professor back at the Oakland campus. Fortunately, as a student in Pitt’s first online degree program, Rudolph had all the flexibility she needed to get her schoolwork done. Working from her kitchen table and extra bedroom in Clarks Summit, Pa., a suburb of Scranton, Rudolph earned a master’s degree in Library and Information Science in two years, only a year longer than it would take an on-campus student. If not for the FastTrack program, Rudolph’s only viable option for pursuing her master’s degree would have been attending a community college located 20 miles from her home. But when the School of Library and Information Sciences opened the FastTrack program in May 2001, Pitt’s MLIS program, ranked third in the nation, became available at the push of a computer button. And Rudolph jumped at the chance. Pitt is a tradition in her family. Rudolph earned her bachelor’s degree in biology here in 1975. Her father graduated from the College of Business Administration in 1950, and her grandfather took classes in 1907 while working as a barber in North Braddock. Now she could do the same thing—work and study simultaneously—but in a fashion they could never have imagined. The first group of FastTrack students, including Rudolph and 34 others, enrolled that May. Professors posted questions and readings on the Web, and students dialoged, via e-mail, before posting responses. Occasionally, there were synchronized meetings of students in Internet chat rooms. Friendships formed. “We’ll always have a network now of people in public libraries throughout the United States,” says Rudolph. “I can write to my classmates in Florida or Delaware and say, ‘Gee, what are you guys doing out there?’” There was one final task, though, that Rudolph had to come to Pittsburgh to complete. On April 27, she made the five-hour drive to campus to receive her diploma at commencement. |
