In my doctoral program, there was a class that we colloquially referred to as “babydocs.” As it was taught the year I took it, the purpose of babydocs was two-fold: 1. to introduce us to the field of library and information science and the variety of potential research areas and 2. to introduce us to the skills a person needs to be a scholar.

It’s been over seven years since I started babydocs and I’m still trying to get that “how to be a scholar” part down. Here are the topics and skills babydocs covered in this vein:

• Theory and methods
• Literature reviews
  • searching for literature
  • reading other people’s literature reviews
  • managing literature
  • writing literature reviews
• Peer review
• Project management
• Research ethics
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Presenting orally
• Empirical research methods
• Collaborative & interdisciplinary work
• Creating posters
• Writing research proposals
• Grants and funding
• Data management
• Writing referred papers
• Metrics

This was a two-semester course and that was only HALF of what we covered, with the other half being specific to our discipline.

I know how to do all of the things on this list, but I still haven’t created a cohesive framework or workflow that lets me do them in any but the most just-in-time manner. But a just-in-time scholar isn’t really the kind of scholar I want to be.

(And I do want to be a scholar, even though I’m not interested in tenure-track work.)

I share all of this because I’m going to try, all these years later, to create such a framework. Something that wasn’t part of babydocs.

I plan to blog about it and I thought y’all might like to follow along.