Purpose: Experience + reflection = growth. This assignment gives you the opportunity to reflect on the effort you’ve put into your APP over the last two semesters and to articulate what you will take away from the experience.
Back in the fall semester, you were asked to think about your APP in three ways:
- It would meet the learning goals of creating professional work products that help your client make progress on a public policy problem.
- It would help you grow as a policy analyst in areas you wanted to work on (e.g., organizing and completing a thesis-length project, quantitative or qualitative data collection and analysis, interacting with a client, increasing your network, increasing your substantive knowledge in an area, etc.).
- You would engage in something personally meaningful to you.
At the start of the spring semester, we talked about the Value Added to your client and to yourself (and thus those whom you will be helping in the future with your improved insights and abilities), through the lens of a Constrained Optimization Problem.
As we’re wrapping up, let’s take time to reflect: How did it go? What have you learned about your topic, the process of a long-term project, yourself?
Task: Send you professor an email which answers at least three of the questions. Provide details and examples to bring color to your reflection. If you want to come up with your own question, that’s valid as well!
- How do you feel about your choice of your APP client and topic? What made them a good or bad fit? What should future students know going into the selection process? What do you know now that you wish you had known last summer/fall?
- You’ve now worked on a major project over the course of almost a year and succeeded – congratulations! What did you learn about your ability to take on and accomplish long-term goals? What practices helped you to succeed over the long run? What lessons from this endeavor can you apply to other goals that require sustained attention and effort?
- We began the semester with a survey of your “Current strengths” and your “Desired improvements.” Review your survey answers. How did you use your strengths? Did you grow in the areas of your desired improvements? Why or why not?
- You’re enrolled in a leadership and public policy program. How did leadership play a role this semester, either personally, in class/team meetings, or in researching and writing your APP?
- Talk about a struggle you’ve had in this course, either with your individual work, with your classmates, with your professor, or with the APP structure as a whole. What was the struggle? If you resolved it, how? What do you wish you had done differently (if anything)? What have you learned?
- Five years from now, what do you think you will have taken from this course? How do you imagine it will change how you think about and live your life, professionally or personally (if at all!)?
- What do you respect the most about one or more of your APP teammates (or perhaps another person from class whom you admire)? What made them so impactful? What lessons will you carry forward from them? What can/will you do to let them know about your appreciation?
Additionally, building upon this reflection, be sure to fill out the online evaluation for this course. Any areas where you can suggest improvements (or keeping the same what worked well) will be helpful as we work to improve this course for future Batten students and their clients.