Personal Development

I am fully aware that during my student and working life I will be asked to be reflective. Evaluating and analysing situations and events that happen around myself and in the workplace. By experience and self thought I hope to gain technical knowledge and develop interpersonal skills.

I think reflectively most of the time, I consider myself to be thoughtful, analyzing how well I did and if there is room for improvement or if a change in my attitude is needed.

Furthermore, reflection can be described in the following main points:

• Self awareness: contemplating yourself in context with your past life experiences and your perspective of the society you live in.
• Self improvement: the capacity of learning from previous situations you experienced and putting plans in place to better yourself.
• Empowerment: being able to take responsability for your actions and take steps to change your habits and aspects of your life.

Kolb’s Learning Cycle

According to Kolb (1984) the learning cycle consists of four main connected elements in a loop frequently commencing with experience:

Source: Solent online learning

The four elements of Kolb’s Learning Cycle:

• Experience. Dare to take the first step, even if you are unsure about how to do it. Just do it.
• Observations and reflections. Gather as much information and feedback as possible, ask your peers and tutors for their opinion to have a different perspective. Take some time to analyse and reflect on the experience.
• Discuss, propose, develop ideas and solutions to addressed problems or areas of improvement. Draw an action plan, set goals and deadlines.
• Put in practice what you have learnt. Test and evaluate your proposed solutions, make observations, gather results and feedback. Assess if you achieve the desired outcome.

Reflecting on my first weeks of study at university I consider I need to improve my communication skills, I am confident about my capacity of improvement through hard work, dedication and enthusiasm.

One of the aspects I will pay more attention is team working and leadership. Nowadays, in every professional field it is of major importance to team work with colleagues and peers in order to achieve common goals. I recognize I have to put myself forward to lead during group activities.

One of the activities I enjoy at timetabled lectures is being asked to do research and find information about a certain topic from a number of sources. I feel comfortable when presented with different problems and I consider myself proactive regarding my learning and research approach.

Regarding problem solving skills, the work experience I gained in different sectors gave me the ability to analyse and problem solving unexpected situations and to take decisions quickly. However, I would like to have the opportunity to test my skills within the IT industry.

I have strong work ethics and have always been keen on developing myself, through work experience or academically. Moreover, I always try to further my knowledge through extra work, for instance doing more in addition to unit lab-sheets and reading from a variety of sources such as books, magazines and the internet. I am currently following object-oriented programming in python online course.

Overall, in my first term at university, I experienced some difficulties regarding my soft skills but I also became fully aware I am capable to overcome my shortcomings at higher education level by thinking critically and reflectively.