Personal Reflection In Psychology

The essay demonstrates your ability to write clearly and concisely on a selected topic and helps you distinguish yourself in your own voice. What do you want the readers of your application to know about you apart from courses, grades, and test scores? Choose the option that best helps you answer that question and write an essay of no more than 650 words, using the prompt to inspire and structure your response. Remember: 650 words is your limit, not your goal. Use the full range if you need it, but don't feel obligated to do so. (The application won't accept a response shorter than 250 words.)

This reflection will discuss personal diffidence and how it has influenced my academic studies, including my practice within placement settings. Gibbs reflective cycle (Gibbs, 1998) has been utilised as it illustrates a clear structure for the process of reflection. To conclude this reflection will draw together the themes which have emerged and highlight a clear action for future learning that will be used in order to enhance my future practice.

Psychology is the science behind the mind; the answer to every question one can have on the human mind and those inhabiting a brain. Psychology is simply a course of answers that is proved by rock solid evidence and factual research. By taking this class, I am gaining answers for the various questions I have asked. Simply put, I desire to have the knowledge others don’t even consider and sometimes, even lack. Such as why we act the way we do and what causes those reactions to take place. Answers to such questions reside in the field of psychology, the solution to all our questions regarding ourselves.

I consider myself someone who values the question “why?”. My entire life I have caught myself questioning things that others never really seemed to care to think about, about a multitude of subjects. Specifically, asking those close to me like my parents, siblings, friends, and now my husband. Leaning this semester about Psychology has been very interesting to me because it had helped me understand the “why” behind the way the brain works. In this class, Lifespan Growth and Development, I have learned about concepts that I will be able to carry with me throughout my college education, my professional career, my marriage, and my eventual parenthood as a mother.

I believe I can have a lot of respect for the players, the server, and its reputation. I try my best to be as respectful to others because I want to be treated with respect. I've always treated people with respect (except for minor toxicity in the past), especially on this server. I've loved this server since the day I joined back in 2014, I don't know what it is but I always wanted to apply for staff, and I think I'm old enough and mature enough to help the server now. When I first joined Arkham I was playing in other communities as well (soup pvp, potpvp, etc.) and I couldn't not only dedicate time to the server, but I was quite toxic then. I've gotten better over time and have learned to control my "toxicity" so that I could be a nice to new players as possible.

My freshman year of highschool, like most people’s, is not something that I remember fondly. However, it wasn’t about the social displacement or awkward phases that so many upperclassmen lament about-- it was the academic pressure that proliferated my life. As a student on the honors track, I always had a great enthusiasm for learning, but I also experienced an immense pressure to perform above average in the face of the looming honors workload. By the beginning of second semester, I had found myself sitting in the school social worker's office having a full blown breakdown after a concerned English teacher found me crying in her class and had no idea what to do. I remember feeling like I was drowning in a wave of responsibilities that of which felt impossible to fulfill. My grades, my work, my intelligence just wasn’t good enough for all the expectations I had placed upon myself. A year later, I was put on medication for my uncontrollable bouts of anxiety and depression. As someone who already experienced some issues regarding mental health, the amount of pressure I experienced from my parents, teachers, and even myself, pushed me over the edge.

Throughout the semester we have gone over a lot of topics ranging from our short and long-term goals to our desired major and career choices. I have always had a general idea of what I wanted to do, and the only thing that has ever interested me was working with animals. But when I graduated high school I wasn’t completely certain if I wanted to major in veterinary medicine, so I came to school as an exploratory studies student. And when I first attended this class I didn’t think that it would really help me make up my mind and that it was filling up a foundational studies class that I could be taking. But throughout the semester I’ve come to find out that this class has helped me a lot more than I thought it would.

At the beginning of the semester, my main goal was to declare a major and this class was supposed to help me. After attending this class a few times, I was not sure it was the class for me. The syllabus included resumes and activities that did not involve declaring a major. Now that the semester is over, the activities that involved declaring a major helped me tremendously and the ones that did not still have benefited me. Even though I thought I did not need to learn more about those other topics, I learned more helpful tips on top of what I already knew. With this class only being once a week, most of the content has helped me learn about myself, future, and the work place.

Throughout my high school career, I have been able to greatly develop my writing. Prior to my senior year, I was already quite confident about completing research papers, which have been required in a number of my CHS classes. I also had a lot of experience writing expository essays. After all, the process of writing a thesis and then breaking up an essay into distinct sections has been preached ever since elementary school. Going into my senior year of high school, I still had a lot to learn in narrative and timed writing. My greatest improvement this year was in the the timed writing category. Before recently, I had always struggled to come up with enough ideas to write a logical essay in a short amount of time. This year, perhaps because of the sheer volume of timed essays that we wrote, I was able to develop a sense of calm and confidence at the start of each assessment. Under these conditions, I could think more clearly and logically. I am still struggling to master the narrative, even if that isn’t reflected in my grade. For me, it is always a very difficult task to start a narrative, and if I am not careful, the story quickly becomes repetitive and dull. Again, more practice should help fix this.

Before taking Western Heritage: The Humanities, I had only taken general writing courses WRT 110 and 111 at the University of Hartford. Those classes taught me basic stylistic ways of writing and expressing my opinion. I thought that this course, one in which we turn in written responses on various texts would be similar, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. This class made me shift the way I write, more deeply analyze texts to uncover the author's meanings, and open up my perspectives on various worldly topics.

Psychology is “the systematic, objective study of our mental activity and our behavior” (Grison, Heatherton, Gazzaniga, 2017, p. 5). In order to fully comprehend ourselves, we should understand the reasons for our behaviors and if the behaviors are healthy. Habits and behaviors have positive and negative effects in our life and health. When we know ourselves and learn about our unique personality, we can develop as confident individuals and pursue endeavors and goals. Psychology also enables us to understand other people and the differences of people. Gaining this knowledge and understanding enhances the relationships in our lives and allows us to develop stronger communication skills. Throughout the psychology course, I encompassed knowledge in various areas, and the topics that impacted me included: the introvert, anxiety disorders, coping with stress, sleep and how to develop strong relationships.

My reason for failing to meet satisfactory academic progress (SAP), or my lack of successful completion of credit hours attempted, is due to emotional hardship. During the Spring semester of 2017, I stopped showing up to classes entirely a little bit before midterms. I stopped going because of the state of my mental health. I am currently diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder, Major Depression, and Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder.

During Summer 2014, I took my first college course “Math 10: Elementary Algebra” also known as remedial math. However, ever since I can remember, I have always liked math and this seems to contradict how I started my college career. My interest in math goes back to second grade when I received a 100 on my report card. In Bangladesh, grades are believed to reflect one’s identity, so I took a greater interest in the subject thereafter. After moving to New York, I continued to enjoy the subject though the language barrier prevented me from fully understanding the “universal language.” My passion for math waned, yet never fully extinguished, until eleventh grade when I took geometry. I was fortunate to have a teacher who made the class more enjoyable than any math I have experienced before. It was then I entertained the idea of becoming a high school math teacher in the future.

Before going into my reflective essay, it is important to first know what is reflective learning and journal writing. Reflective learning is the system of internally analysing and exploring a problem of concern, triggered by an experience, which creates and clarifies meaning in terms of self, and which ends up in a modified conceptual angle (Boyd and Fales, 1983). Journal writing on the other hand, is the recording of each day events, personal reflections, questions about the environment, and reactions to experiences (Dyment and O’Connell, 2003). According to Kerka (1996), journal writing is considered to be vital factor of expertise processing and that it enables the learners to “articulate connections between new information and what they already recognise”.

I was not concerned about politics as a child, I was more concerned with the next level I was playing in Mario or the next Spider-Man movie. As far I was concerned, racism ended in the 1960s, the opposing side of the war were just bad guys from movies. and taxes were beyond my comprehension. So when I learned that we were going to have a new president in 2008, I was engrossed by it. Still though, I knew nothing about politics. All I knew is that my parents must know what’s good, right? My parents supported Barack Obama in 2008. They were tired of President Bush’s policies, and after the 2008 Financial Crisis, they, like many Americans, wanted change. Nine-year-old me didn’t realize what was going on, but the fact there was going to be a new president got me excited.