My Strengths… and Weaknesses
Assessing one’s self is always a challenging exercise, since a person is given an advantage of direct introspection, but a disadvantage of a possible ego-backed blind spot(s), but I will try to do my best nevertheless. I think that my biggest weakness in learning style in this course was my inability to keep up with a predefined schedule, and as a result, leaving oftentimes work to the last minute. This reveals some organizational challenges which I encountered during several of my assignments. Regarding to the assignments themselves, in the beginning of the term, I described wordiness to be my biggest challenge. Now, I still think that it is the case, despite the fact that I have seen some improvements. Furthermore, the problem with awkward phrasing also became less prominent, since I started to proofread my work more carefully, but it also persists.
Among my strengths, I believe that the most significant is habit to approach writing systematically. No matter what assignment I am doing, I start from understanding the requirements, jotting down ideas, then outlining, and then writing. This keeps the process moving and makes writing itself seem less daunting. I know that this saves me a lot of time since every time I am trying to break the sequence and write something without a plan, I start to procrastinate and my writing becomes less coherent and clear. A strength in my assignments would be perhaps trying to identify the learning purpose of the assignment and not trying to “cut corners”. Instead, I am trying to feel that I am learning something, to grow my knowledge “database” of what I learned, rather than leaving assignment at the state of minimal requirements. That is, I always strive to reflect on my learning, on my mistakes to not to make the same one twice.
How do Strengths and Weaknesses Relate to my Future Career?
I think that the strengths and weaknesses described above directly relate to my future career. The ability to be systematic in doing tasks would certainly help in finding a job, for example, as it requires applying to dozens or hundreds of places, and organizing a library of cover letter paragraph or phrase templates, for example, helps a lot. Also, being systematic would certainly help in getting through a job training or learning a new skill, or getting a smaller certificate/skill in an online course to further my career. Always striving to get learning outcomes would also be beneficial for my future career, as in order to learn new skills, one certainly needs to first want to learn them, and I feel I always have a motivation for that.
On the other hand, my organizational struggles could certainly hold me back. Perhaps being slightly out of sync with your work is not too bad sometimes, but in a dynamic environment of a software company, delaying a project or postponing important tasks would not be beneficial. Even little things, such as checking email inbox on time, replying to messages and updating task lists can be important. So I think that in order to utilize my strengths to the fullest, I have to overcome my organizational challenges by building positive habits in my daily life.