Goal-Setting Table – Fall ’24
| GOAL DIMENSIONS | Near Term Goals (Fall 2024 & 2024-2025) | Longer Term Goals (2024-2027+) |
| PERSONAL | The three courses—Effective Public Speaking, Intro to Communications, and Elements of Acting—all emphasize communication skills vital to individual success. These courses, aligned with the Core Handbook’s values, focus on improving connections with others, helping me work towards my goal of enhancing my interpersonal skills by combining my knowledge for better outcomes. I aim to further develop a growth mindset, inspired by Carol Dweck’s TED Talk on the power of “not yet.” By embracing challenges and viewing setbacks as opportunities for learning, I wish to start shifting my perspective toward continuous improvement, knowing that progress is ongoing rather than finite. | You could call it an academic goal, but I prefer it to be a personal goal… I want to develop a professional portfolio that not only showcases projects, such as video production or communication pieces, for future career opportunities, but things that I love to do as personal hobbies–like photography, poetry, short stories, fashion blogs, etc. This correlates directly to the ePortfolio that’s mandatory by the University. Not only will my future employers, or others I meet along the way, see my professional work and skills I can bring to a company or brand, but they will also see my true self and who I am as an individual. (We call it our “core selves” in my Intro to Communications class). I have a long term goal of traveling to other countries. I wish to broaden my horizons and collect a deeper understanding of diverse perspectives and cultures. This relates to the Handbook’s Core values, as I would increase my “…understanding of the diversity of societies across the globe…”. |
| EXTRACURRICULAR | I wish to learn how to defend myself if the need ever arises, and my father told me it’s a valuable skill to have–I think it was his own worries of not being able to protect me constantly anymore that led him to push me to learn self defense. I therefore joined the MMA Club in hopes of accomplishing that goal. Now I know, nowhere in the Core Handbook, or the Dweck TedTalk, did it say “protect yourself”, but it is a large near term goal that I have, as I am living in a bigger area and am growing into independence. My second extracurricular goal pertains to the Multicultural Club. Coming from a tiny town in the middle of Maine–one that is set in their ways–it was hard to learn much of any other cultures. My goal is to enhance my understanding of other cultures and learn from the experiences and backgrounds of others. This goes hand-in-hand with the Core Handbook’s Core Values Statement, third paragraph, sentence one: “…provide students with essential preparation for responsible caring for the wellbeing of individual, civil societies, and our shared planet”. | Tennis is a lifelong sport–one I dream to be playing for the rest of my life. Since it is more of an individualistic sport, it’s often times you don’t spend too much time with another person on the same side of the court, unless you’re playing doubles of course. In doing so, it is essential that you make a connection with others; you need to trust one another to have your back in order to be successful on the court. That comes with good communication skills: reading the body language of your partner to see if she’s ready to return the hit, and talk back and forth about who is running up to the net, or who is switching. In my Intro to Communications class, we are learning just that: reading others body language and how to be effective communicators. You don’t have much time before a return hit when you’re running out on that court, so your words have to be concise and precise. Photography is something I have loved since I was little. I wish to increase my knowledge and skill set. In doing so, I know there will be plenty of learning curves, especially when trying to build a name for yourself and getting your photos out there. So I turn to Carol Dweck’s speech on “The Power of Yet”, where she talks about the power of believing that you can improve, and when faced with challenges, embracing them as they will only make you stronger. |
| ACADEMIC | As this year goes on, I hope to continue actively participating in class discussions in order to boost my engagement and understanding. I have had trouble in the past with the concept of failure. I do not like to fail, or be wrong. Carol Dweck talks about kids shying away from conflict and things they don’t understand because they don’t want to face failure. I do not want to be a kid that does that; I want to do the opposite. I want to try to engage deeply and develop my abilities, and learn from my mistakes in order to breed success. I wish to improve my time management by scheduling study sessions for each class weekly. I already do that, but I don’t think I manage my time well enough. I spend way too much time on each assignment. So I hope to utilize SASC as this year moves forward and gain the skills to better help me with managing my study time. | An academic goal of mine is to further develop my communication and video production skills, as I dream to work in either film or as a broadcaster one day. The skills needed perfectly align with the objectives of my Intro to Communications class, and other communications and media classes I will have to take as time moves forward. By mastering these skills, I’ll be better equipped to convey messages effectively across various media platforms. Another longer term goal of mine is learning another language fluently. I took 4 years of French, and still have a long way to go in order to become fluent in that language. Unfortunately, French is a slowly dying language, whereas Spanish is the largest minority language in our country. And considering my goal of being successful in the communication field, I am conflicted. Do I choose a dying language and learn it because it might not be around someday in the future, or do I master a language that I could potentially be around more often and have it elevate my resume? Looking through the Handbook, Exploration courses are mandatory here at UNE, and they can be language. So I hope to pursue a language class in the future, and perhaps learn more than one as I move forward in life. |
Reflection:
Filling out this table, I struggled with finding appropriate goals for each dimension. And when I say appropriate, I mean ones that could connect with the articles and videos we watched for class, and the courses I am enrolled in, all while fitting the dimension’s requirements. Some were easier than others, and those ones have a lot more words written under them, because once I found a connection, I could easily exploit it. The other’s took almost too much brain power to write only 3 or 4 measly sentences, relating them to a subject in the mentioned works, that it made me feel kind of incompetent. However, after 72 minutes, to be exact, I finally finished the grid, and finally felt good about what I had written.
