MSIS Student Karen Beal Awarded Gary R. Purcell Scholarship
Karen Beal is nearing the end of completing her MSIS program, a goal of hers that she’s had since high school. She had put it off for years and finally went for it, and now it has enhanced her current career and given her other options for the future should she wish to go down a different path.
Beal will get to finish out her last year in the program with the support of the Gary R. Purcell Scholarship, which goes, “to a student who shows unusual promise as a leader in the field of information sciences, in research and innovation, intellectual activity, and creativity and management. It is an award for overall excellence, rather than excellence in any one particular area.” Gary R. Purcell was the founding director of the School of Information Sciences, and this is an endowed scholarship in his honor. Beal said she is thrilled to be the recipient of such a scholarship and says she only hopes she can prove worthy of the honor.
Beal is currently the manager of the Tech Commons for the IT department at Fairmont State University in Fairmont, West Virginia, but she is moving into another position within the same department where she will lead a team that supports academic technologies for faculty and facilitates professional development for both faculty and staff. She said she can already see how some of her classes, such as Management of Information Organizations, will come in handy when she is in that new role.
She also made sure to take classes that piqued her interest, most notably those about collections and archives, such as Digital Libraries, Digital Curation, and Archives and Records Management.
Beal will complete her degree next spring, though she said that ending isn’t necessarily something she’s excited to see arrive.
“I don’t want to stop being a student. I really enjoy the people I’ve worked with, the instructors, my advisor, and I’ve made some friends. I love the programs and extra activities,” she said.
Beal is a part of both the University of Tennessee, Knoxville student chapters of the Special Libraries Association and the Society for American Archivists, and those have really rounded out her experience. It’s one of many reasons she’s happy she chose UT for her master’s program – others include that West Virginia doesn’t have such a program so she qualified for academic common market tuition, and that the program just looked really interesting to her.
“I was drawn to the program itself, it seemed like a better fit to me than any of the other options that were available. I’m really glad I picked it, this has been an excellent experience,” she said.