13 Building A Successful big picture
Building a successful course track
When deciding what classes to choose, it is never a simple question about one single class. Instead, students are shaping a big picture of their academic or career universe by exploring each class’s connection to their strategical goals. The journey to a degree is built within a framework where each assignment, project, and class is a solid building block and prepares themselves to be successful in their long-term academic or career plan.
Generally, when facing hundreds or even thousands of classes, some important strategies can be very helpful:
1. Check out your options for your course track
Familiarize yourself with the available courses prior to meeting with your adviser. During your first and second years, you’ll take many of your required core classes. However, you’ll also have space for elective courses. This is an opportunity for you to take courses that spark your interest.
2. Talk to professionals
Before it’s time to enroll in courses, consider meeting with a professional in your intended industry. Ask them which college courses added the most value to their learning experience.
3. Connect with communities
Get to know real world problems by involving in the local community and exposed to diverse demands beyond classroom. This experience helps to create more independent study and design a path best fitting in the student’s own need.
4. Consider the course’s contribution to promote yourself
Courses are not independent pieces of unrelated topics, instead, they contribute together to build your expertise specific to a program or the job market. In this sense, the learning results from each course need to be easily observed and evaluated by outside world. The course assessment is expected to help you create more thoughtful products rather than memory-based test questions.
Taking Chinese as a primary step toward profound cultural experiences and cultural studies
This CHNS course provides opportunities to think over topics on understanding oriental cultural and designing strategies for foreign cultural studies.
The beauty of the class is to put students in charge of their learning by giving students choices and the means to assess their progress. This strategy strongly fosters students’ metacognition and independence. Students actively participated in the discussion on questions such as “what is a learning result of this class?” or “how can I design an activity/project that encourage deep engagement?” When making their own decision, students not only engage with course content, but also develop a vision of a correlated achievement in their interested field.
CHNS students can pick from diverse ways to demonstrate their written mastery (paper), verbal mastery (presentations), visual mastery (video editing), as well as kinesthetic mastery (video shooting).
Designing your academic/career path for a wider audience
When students work hard to get a good grade, they need to ask a question what a grade can tell other people about my study background, my strength, my interests, etc. Unfortunately, it means very little. One needs to dig deeper and take a look at a timeline-based process in order to understand a student’s ability.
Students need an environment to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise. To make their growth seen by more people, the class needs to help students to show learning results in relevant and engaging ways so that the student’s potential can be recognized. This requires student’s assessment to go beyond repeated exercise or simple numeric grade. Students can show their potentials by using a technology-enriched tool, such as multimedia or visualization, to name a few.
Therefore a student always needs to show real value through more tools rather than a simple grade. As discussed in 100 Things Students Can Create To Demonstrate What They Know, tech-enabled tools help students to demonstrate themselves more effectively. While a single course may show a limited aspect of a student’s experience, below, we list a few comprehensive ways that students can use to combine products over time.
A. Portfolio
A portfolio is a compilation of academic and professional materials that exemplifies your beliefs, skills, qualifications, education, training, and experiences. It provides insight into your personality and work ethic.
Choosing the most relevant academic and professional experiences and putting them in an easily understood format will show an employer proof of your organizational, communication, and tangible career-related skills.
B. Professional images in media
Participating in professional discussion through such media as blog and discussion forum. You can capture the attention by showing your work, raise good questions, and provide solutions. Your growth and persistence in a specific field can promote your professional development and open more doors for you.
C. Social media platforms
Before participating in a social media, get to know the platforms. It seems like new social media platforms emerge every day, but the hottest new app may not be the best choice for you. Currently, the largest platforms are still Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. They can connect you with a large number of audience but give you narrow chance to be found by people who share same interests. So building a coherent network is an important step. You can start from people who know you in real world and then gradually expand to the cyber worlds.
