In this week, the main goal is to reflect on our learning process as master’s students in UX design. According to Osterman and Kottkamp, reflection is defined as “a means by which practitioners can develop a greater level of self-awareness about the nature and impact of their performance, an awareness that creates opportunities for professional growth and development”. From that perspective, I understand why it is part of the Development Practice module and thus we have to reflect on these for our personal development:
After working as a network engineer for almost 5 years, I don’t see myself to keep continuing the job in the future. Network engineering requires me to have a not-so-normal sleep schedule because network maintenance mostly starts from midnight until morning. I was in a burnt-out state and tried to look for other opportunities. One time, my company offered bootcamp scholarships for selected employees. The company I work at is a telco company that is shifting to a digital company. Therefore, other than hiring new talents for the new organisational structure in the company, they also give an opportunity to its employees who want to shift their career roles by training them. I then took the opportunity, went through the selection process for UI/UX bootcamp, got selected, and finished the bootcamp last year. From there I realised that this is the kind of role that I am passionate about. Ever since my undergraduate degree, I have always been interested in making beautiful apps. I then decided to take UI/UX more seriously by looking for a master’s degree opportunity which landed me here, at Falmouth University.
Realising that doing a double degree in another country that is very distant and unfamiliar is not as easy as expected. Everything is so different and I have problems that I have never occurred before such as time management, fear of failure, and other things are mixed up as one. But then again nothing worth comes easy. Every day, I try to reflect on myself to be better at doing my work. Creating priorities based on responsibility and always remembering the main goal if I finish this degree.
The first point that will shape my outlook for the future is the ability to see opportunities and the right timing to catch them. In this sense, hesitation will be the main blocker when achieving my goal.
The second one is consistency. Any effort that I made will result not by doing some big thing. But by small things that I keep doing. In order to stay consistent, I followed the 6 steps to achieve success (Nitin Shah, 2021) which are the following: (1) create a reminder, (2) reward myself on every small achievement, (3) correct mistakes, (4) use motivational tools, (5) give myself time to see changes, and (6) consult to a coach or therapist.
From the reflection activities above and course material from week 1, I realised that being reflective is also part of Scrum process, which is at the retrospective stage, where everyone in the team reflects on what went well, what went wrong, and what could be improved from previous actions. (Agile Alliance).
The main point of writing a reflective journal is not to be descriptive, but rather to be able to evaluate and develop from it. In order to evaluate how well a reflective journal is written, there are 5 domains that need to be put into consideration when writing:
Based on those domains, I myself thought that I’d most likely be lacking in the interpersonal and cognitive domains because I usually have a hard time making decisions and evaluating my own strength and weaknesses. I mostly had to ask for others’ opinions to evaluate myself in these domains. In terms of writing a reflective journal, on the other hand, I found myself actually doing good at the interpersonal domain, and as expected, I am not doing so well in expressing my cognitive domain in my previous reflective journal.
*Figure 1, Reflective domains assessment*
After assessing myself with the 5 reflective domains, I now realised my strength and weakness and the challenges behind them. In order to develop myself, I create a plan that is based on SMART Goals which I will explain in the next part.
SMART Goals will help in creating a plan that is actually actionable and has a result, A SMART goal has to be Specific, which means there is no room for ambiguity; Measurable, Achievable, meaning it is challenging enough but still possible to be achieved; Relevant, meaning whether the goal is necessary or whether the timing is right; and Time-bound, meaning there has to be a time limit of every action plan.
In the case of writing a reflective journal, my SMART goal would be able to master creating a reflective journal by including all the 5 reflective domains in my journal. I will achieve this by spending more time understanding each module (at least 1 hour a day) and doing an evaluation by assessing the domain tags (like the table above) every week I write my journal.
Agile Alliance. 'Scrum'. Available at: https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/scrum/ [accessed 02/10/21]
Nitin Shah. 2021. ‘Consistency is The Key to Success’. ICHARS. Available at: https://www.instituteofclinicalhypnosis.com/self-help/consistency-is-the-key-to-success/ [accessed 02/12/202]
Osterman, K., Kottkamp, R. 1993. ReflectivePractice for Educators: Improving Schooling through Professional Development. Corwin Press.
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Sarah Shafira Novianti
GDO710 Development Practice
MA User Experience Design, Falmouth University