The first thing that I will continuously use in my career is the experience with Interview Stream and the practice experience. So much of my job now and future higher education jobs revolve around communication skills. I must be able to get across the main points to help students with any and every problem. I also need these skills for presentations, conferences, and future interviews of course. I think I will continue to learn about how to communicate and present, but most importantly I will build upon the skills that I developed in this class. The second concept from this class that I will apply to my work is what we learned about professional development. When I started this class, I would get multiple emails a week about attending presentations for professional development. I looked at them as time out of the office a personal reason, which was unacceptable. As I started to get more of these emails and continued to learn from this class, I discovered that they weren’t just events that sounded interesting. They became something that were beneficial for me to attend personally, academically, and professionally. I no longer feel unprofessional for going to multiple presentations because I know they are helping me become a better higher education professional. I am also taking on the role as mentor when I encourage my coworkers to come along with me because I realize now how much they help me.
I think the biggest academic challenge I faced was balancing work and school. It’s interesting because it’s a problem that most students in college face and one that I will likely be helping students with in the future. It was difficult in the beginning to figure out the right schedule of when to work on school assignments and for how long each night. Once I found that balance I was mostly able to stick to it, but there are always things happening in life that throw us off balance. Working through those experiences was very difficult. The best thing I did to help in those situations was to constantly communicate with classmates, especially those in my group. I made sure that they knew what was going on and they would keep me up to date on things happening in class if I was not able to log in to class. Another strategy I used was keeping a couple planners with all my assignments written down. This way I had multiple reminders of what was going on so that I wouldn’t forget them in the stress of other life events.
My ultimate career goal is to become an academic adviser. The lessons and assignments in this class fueled that goal and made me realize how much I look forward to being an adviser. With this class I was able to develop smaller goals to help be achieve the big goal. One of my biggest goals is to improve on my critical reading skills. In order to continuously work in higher education requires professionals to stay up to date on the newest studies and literature. I learn excellent tips in this class and enjoyed the practice that we were assigned. I know that I need to continue reading these types of articles, which I am sure will be a large part of the classes I have left to take for my degree. Another goal I had before this class started was to earn some special projects at my current job. It’s customary for admissions counselors to not only help with the day to day activity in the office but to also work on individual projects that are often partnerships with other offices or organizations. During this semester I finally earned my own special project and while I was excited for the new responsibility, I was also nervous about managing a project alone. While going through this class I not only learned about how to effectively manage a project, but also learned about how to properly ask for help and present updates on my project properly.
I think the biggest academic challenge I faced was balancing work and school. It’s interesting because it’s a problem that most students in college face and one that I will likely be helping students with in the future. It was difficult in the beginning to figure out the right schedule of when to work on school assignments and for how long each night. Once I found that balance I was mostly able to stick to it, but there are always things happening in life that throw us off balance. Working through those experiences was very difficult. The best thing I did to help in those situations was to constantly communicate with classmates, especially those in my group. I made sure that they knew what was going on and they would keep me up to date on things happening in class if I was not able to log in to class. Another strategy I used was keeping a couple planners with all my assignments written down. This way I had multiple reminders of what was going on so that I wouldn’t forget them in the stress of other life events.
My ultimate career goal is to become an academic adviser. The lessons and assignments in this class fueled that goal and made me realize how much I look forward to being an adviser. With this class I was able to develop smaller goals to help be achieve the big goal. One of my biggest goals is to improve on my critical reading skills. In order to continuously work in higher education requires professionals to stay up to date on the newest studies and literature. I learn excellent tips in this class and enjoyed the practice that we were assigned. I know that I need to continue reading these types of articles, which I am sure will be a large part of the classes I have left to take for my degree. Another goal I had before this class started was to earn some special projects at my current job. It’s customary for admissions counselors to not only help with the day to day activity in the office but to also work on individual projects that are often partnerships with other offices or organizations. During this semester I finally earned my own special project and while I was excited for the new responsibility, I was also nervous about managing a project alone. While going through this class I not only learned about how to effectively manage a project, but also learned about how to properly ask for help and present updates on my project properly.