Devices Sartia has
Smartphone: Sarita uses her smartphone as an alarm in the morning. She uses it as a study timer for writing her papers and reminding her to take a break, and she uses the Quizlet app to test herself on basic knowledge for her classes. She accesses her social media accounts, checks emails, makes calls, sends texts messages, checks her university and bank accounts, records videos and takes pictures during a regular week with her phone.
Tablet: She does not currently have a tablet but she does have a Kindle, which she has used to download some books for some of her courses on campus. However, she rarely reads on her Kindle because she prefers to read a hard copy of the book.
Computer: Her Dell laptop is primarily used for school and work-related activities, such as downloading articles, writing papers, posting on discussion boards, translating questionnaires and survey responses, and checking in on the Slack stream for her professor’s funded project. However, she has been known to stream some videos from her public library’s Kanopy streaming video account on the weekends and flip through some magazines using the public library’s Hoopla subscription.
Connectivity
Sarita works and lives on campus, so she has almost continual internet access through the university. When she’s away from the university, she depends on the 3G/LTE connection on her smartphone.
Social media platforms and web resources consulted
- Sarita has Facebook and Twitter accounts which she browses frequently for posts from her favorite pages: the university page, the local newspaper, some national U.S. and Argentinan newspapers, music fanpages for Pink Floyd, Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana.
- She uses her university’s campus map function and Google Maps to find unknown places she has to go. She finds that Google Maps is more dependable, but lacks a lot of the finesse of the campus maps app.
- She uses the Gmail app, but also added her school email account into that app, since most of her email is school-related.
- She uses WhatsApp and Viber to communicate specifically with family in Argentina; however, she has found that these apps also help her keep up with what her parents and siblings are doing.
- She recently got a LinkedIn account because she hear from a friend that it is useful to have a professional-like social media profile once you graduate and enter the job market.
- Because of her class research and her assistantship, Sarita accesses a lot of national and international organization sites, particularly looking for new data releases. This year, she’s been a regular visitor at sites like UNESCO, World Bank, the United States Census Bureau, and the Centers for Disease Control.
- She is a big fan of Google Scholar and ResearchGate, especially when she can’t find an article she wants on the university’s library databases.
Frustration with technology
You have to change your messages to suit your audience. Texting is for people that are closer to me. Emails are formal communications. Talking, that’s like for my mom.
Communication
- Sarita uses her smartphone to communicate with her immediate and extended family. She uses voice communications and a host of apps to stay in touch with family, especially while she’s on campus. Her friends say she spends a lot of time on the phone with her parents. Her parents say they almost never talk to her. Sarita knows that her parents would worry more about her if she didn’t talk to them so regularly, so she considers this part of her student life.
- When she’s at home with her parents and siblings, Sarita tries really hard to resist being constantly on her phone and thinking about campus things – but the habit is ingrained!
Information needs and background
Now that she’s in her senior year of college, Sarita has to write a lot more papers than she did as a beginning student. She needs lots of scholarly articles to help her build her research. At this stage, her professors expect her to rely more on her own thought than on textbooks, but they also expect her to use textbook information as part of her background knowledge.
As a research assistant on her professor’s project, Sarita’s duties are mostly related to language and communication with Spanish-speaking populations, as well as finding and cleaning data for her professor to use. This isn’t the research experience she had dreamed of, but the assistantship meant that she would have to take out fewer student loans this year, and that was an important consideration. For all that her parents worry that she’s borrowing too much (and not visiting home enough, and not meeting nice men), she knows it’s her name on the loan papers, not theirs.
Information Sources and Library Use
To get her information, Sartia:
- Watches news on social media, especially Facebook from some of her favorited organizations. She rarely watches TV for news, except when she’s at home with her family. Even then, she’ll have her smartphone in her hand and occasionally look something up on social media.
- Uses reliable sources like national and international organizations, library databases, and Google Scholar when she is doing “academic stuff” but also searches Google, Facebook, and Pinterest for topics that interest her, like music, social work issues, etc.
- Uses online library resources heavily.
Goals for using the library
- To gather articles from reliable sources when she is conducting research for her school papers.
- To use books and other non-journal resources for background information when needed.
- To use leisure services from the public library that allow her to relax.
Sarita Garcia is currently a senior in college, well on her way to earning her bachelor’s degree in social work. Sarita’s goal is to work with other Latinas in need of support and advice, and this goal has only become keener since the 2016 elections. She’s aware that the terminal social work degree is the Master’s degree, so she’s planning on another two years in college after this. As the first person in her family to attend college, Sarita’s parents are proud of her, but also somewhat troubled by her seeming rejection of family norms – she lives on campus, and only visits on holiday breaks, and she hasn’t brought a serious boyfriend home yet! Sarita herself is anxious because her parents don’t understand the college experience, and she’s aware she’s been at a disadvantage compared to some of her peers whose parents did go to college. However, this experience also allowed her to find a support network for first generation college students, and if any of her brothers or sisters decide to go to college, she hopes she can be a resource for them.