Humanities Homework Help

Reflective Discussion – Building a Professional Identity

This discussion is another in which you focus your post and some of your responses within your specialization. On the subject line, place the name of your specialization, then your name.

For this discussion, begin by working through the Career Planning Checklist introduced in this week’s What You Need to Know activity. As you work through it, customize it to create an active, ongoing plan for your own career. Each aspect of the checklist represents a piece of the puzzle of building your professional experience and reputation, so that each aspect presents an opportunity for you to put yourself in a stronger position to pursue the kind of future you want.

As an example of customizing the Career Planning Checklist, for the second aspect of the checklist, “Professional affiliation membership and involvement,” most learners in this course would include the APA. Depending on your career direction, though, you might choose to focus on a particular division within APA. If your specialization is educational psychology, you might naturally gravitate toward APA’s Division 15, Educational Psychology, and focus more of your efforts there. Choose at least two aspects of each time frame within the checklist (Early in Your Program, Mid-Way Through Your Program, and Late in Your Program) and customize their focus for your career direction.

Having worked through and customized the Career Planning Checklist, in your initial post, address the following:

• How do the customizations you made to the Career Planning Checklist fit your career interests? Explain.
• In what areas have you already taken action? Briefly provide examples.
• What areas have you not yet considered? Describe ideas that might work for you.
• How can you use the information in this this week’s activities, factor in your doctoral degree, and begin to create discrete action steps to build your professional identity? What kinds of action steps would make sense in the next few weeks or months?