One of the most important moments for my professional development in semester one would have to be the writing of my values essay.
When this assignment was assigned I was really excited and eager to get going with my reading, I actually started writing within the same week we got our assignment. I was really motivated and had such a positive outlook on this essay and really thought I was going to get a good grade but then life simply got in the way. The excitement faded of exploring the topic on which I had chosen (which was initially race) and the thought of actually sitting down to write the essay almost brought me to tears, so I delayed it as long as I could. Due to family circumstances I was not in my house a lot so I had little motivation, or time, to sit down and begin writing.
It got to about 2 weeks before the deadline and I finally went to the library, the essay I had begun to write was almost finished but me being me decided to start fresh. So, this time I chose to write about gender. This topic was something I felt passionate about as I’ve seen first hand how differently boys and girls get treated so I figured it would be easy. I realize on reflection that this was a very bad idea to change so last minute and the module leader even told me not to change but I ignorantly ignored their advice and began to write my new essay on gender.
Reflecting back I can see that this was a very unprofessional decision to make as I had not researched the topic and had done as much reading as I had on race, and my lack of reading was reflected in my poor grade. I suppose everyone will receive a bad grade at one point in their academic career so I am glad it did happen at this stage. If I was to write the essay again I would have stuck with the topic of race as I had more reading related to that, by starting over again (despite having passion) I made a mountain load of work out a mole hill. From this incident I have learned to never leave things last minute as it does not allow you to reach your full potential and it is just simply unprofessional. The effects of leaving things so last minute could have been much worse than just a bad grade, but I must say my lesson has been learned.
My mantra is now PREPARE, PREPARE, PREPARE!!
