Previous Student Blogs: Find Your Inspiration
We’ve chosen some example blogs from last year’s cohort of students that we hope will give you some inspiration and help you to develop your own reflective thinking and writing skills.
Feel free to browse through the blogs and pay attention to how the students have disclosed content that is revealing (i.e., goes beyond mere description), personal (i.e., includes a discussion of anxieties, strengths and weaknesses), and/or transformative (i.e., considers how past experience can lead to better performance in the future). Think too about whether, and in what ways, the work meets the marking criteria and how it could be improved.
Please remember that your reflection needs to be authentic (i.e., your own) and so while it is great that we can work in a spirit of co-operation in which you can find and read other students’ blog posts, you must be careful not to plagiarise. This is why we ask that all work should also be submitted to Blackboard, an by extension, Turnitin, as well as Medium.
The Blogs
In this post, Ella Johnson reflects on her experiences of completing the digital skills and confidence scale and what the process has taught her about herself.
Here Nicole Warriner reflects on the nature of relection itself and how completing the confidence and digital skills questionnaire helped her to identify some underlying obstacles to success — perfectionism and a fear of commitment.
In this interesting post, Tamara Moon talks about how the Unit allowed her to rewrite her existing CV in way that avoided ‘CV clichés’ and how she managed to replaced generic, characterless phrases (e.g., ‘hard-working’, ‘passionate’) with her own authentic voice.
Here self-confessed technophobe Tessa Higgs, reflects on how coronavirus forced her to engage with new digital platforms, how she has coped with the challenges of working at home as well as areas she still needs to focus on in order to work effectively during the pandemic.
In this post Aidaras Lavrinovičius reflects on what he has learnt from second year, how he has overcome his fear of failure and replaced it with a ‘just do’ attitude and how reflective practices have taught him that passion and drive (in the absence of knowledge and skill) are not enough for success.
In this next post Luke Wriggley talks about how marrying academic theory with actual hands-on practical experience boosted his motivation, and how ‘doggedly’ asking staff for opportunities in Clinical Psychology eventually paid off, leading him to pursue a year-long placement in his chosen field.
May Furnish reflects on how the first lockdown in March 2020 led to a difficult but important shake-up in her already overly constrained routine, which made her reconsider key aspects of her working life and showed her that she was much more resilient that she had first thought.
Finally, Beth Franks reflects on the transformative experience of completing the Confidence Workshop Option and how this led her to invest time in researching alternative careers to those she had previously considered.
