 My name is Akilah Manuel Mills and I have a master's in Librarian Information Science from San Jose State University. One of the things I appreciated was being able to pursue my degree online. Before you get thrown in the deep end, you have a course where it's just basically learning the platform and getting competency on how to actually navigate and learn. The beautiful thing is there's a lot of support and so once you get in your rhythm, you enter kind of a virtual world and form a cadence and it's like walking into a brick-and-mortar building, especially if you're disciplined and go to the same room or area of your home or the same desk and build that muscle memory, you shift once you sit down and then you're in school space. The majority of my professors were working in the field that they were instructing in so they were able to leverage their actual experience and it made them more trustworthy and it made me lean in more because I felt like they were teaching from a position of authority. I had already been an administration, I had already been a supervisor, I had already worked in the public sector and in a non-profit but I was not good at team. I was a driver and almost fiercely independent and I found in my career the library space is very collaborative. There are no lone rangers which was fine in my other workplaces but this culture of librarianship is very collaborative so now I know how to be a team and many facets and it served me well.