Train Your Brain at the Mary Livermore Library

Libraries will always fit into that "third place" category for many people; first and second typically being home and work respectively. Third is somewhere like the bar or the gym or another favorite "other place to be." For many students the third place must be the university library, but a lot of people choose to make the place they enjoy spending their time the Library.
Typically, the Library is known to welcome self-study or group study; but there is another mode of self-improvement going on at the Mary Livermore Library that motivates students, staff and community member's alike to reach outside of the normal comfort zone and learn about something entirely new!
This program is called Train Your Brain and it is a new program provided by the myself, the instructional services librarian at the Mary Livermore Library of UNCP. My main job is to provide classroom instruction to classes to show them how to use the Library's resources. Other times I am allowed to be really creative and do something like this! So far the Train Your Brain program has had two GRE Preparation instruction sessions attended by UNCP students, staff and community members, the purpose of the one hour evening session was to provide basic information about preparing for the GRE, how to go about registering, study tips and introduction to the free resources available.
The feedback was excellent and the most frequent suggestion for improvement was to "have more like this." So I listened and there will be another Train Your Brain session on April 14 to recognize national "Money Smart Week," for which the topic will be educating people about investment resources such as titles by popular investment experts such as Suze Orman, exploring free government savings website guides, free online calculators and budgeting tools, plus introduction to free NC Live databases like the Morningstar Mutual Fund Database.
For the installment following that, we will have a series in May that covers basic computer training. There will be two rounds of Introduction to the Internet, Introduction to Microsoft Word and Introduction to Microsoft Excel. This series will begin in May, when most of our UNCP students are off campus, but who knows? Maybe the community will come visit us in full force? I certainly hope to see you there!