Career Designing: Self-Reflection Prompts
- What do you like to do in your spare time?
- What were you doing the last time you lost track of time?
- What motivates you?
- What keeps your curiosity?
- What makes you feel really alive?
- What do you value that doesn’t cost money?
- What’s your earliest memory of achievement?
- What do you like to work with most? What appeals to you most?
- People, concepts, things, data?
- Putting things together like a puzzle and finding solutions (akin to clinical)
- Taking things apart to determine what happened or went wrong (akin to research)
- Would you want your role to involve discovering or developing something?
- Would you rather deliver the product or service that someone else discovers or develops?
- Do you like working directly with people or would you rather be on your own for long stretches of time?
- What do you value in career aspects of your life?
- Money? Fame? Success – and what does that look like for you?
- Do you want to identify with your career or have a job that pays the bills so you can pursue various interests in other ways?
- 9-5 type? Shift work? Motivated for entrepreneurial lifestyle?
- Do you plan to have children?
- Are private insurance/benefits important? Vacation?
- Do you like high adrenaline fast paced environments? Or not so much.
- Do you want predictability? Can anticipate what the day will look like? Or okay with no idea where the week will take you?
- Desk job versus more active?
- Desire or willingness to be in public eye (media)?
- Teaching appeal to you?
- Travel?
- What have you liked most about what you’re learned so far in courses related to your main discipline of study?
- What courses have you found most interesting so far? Do you know why?
- What have you not liked so much about NEUR courses? Do you know why?
- Do you have any specific interest about a faculty member’s research or teaching focus?
- Have you felt inspired by any of your professors? How and why are they inspiring?
- What non-NEUR courses have you liked most so far? Do you know why?
- What have been your least favourite? Do you know why?
- What are you drawn to for electives, and why?
- What skills do you think you possess?
- Innate and developed through life (not necessarily academic)
- Academic and through university so far
- What areas do you feel you need improvement?
- What are you really good at? What’s your greatest strength?
- What skills would you like to gain?
- What can you do today that you couldn’t do a year ago?
- Think back to how you would have approached a task/assignment/project in high school versus now. Consider how far you’ve come with skills sets, ways of thinking, approaches to problem-solving.
- Reflect on your past and current experience. Do you have more experience now with any of the following? What stands out the most to you as a skill you’ve developed throughout your degree?
- Communicating scientific data to various audiences
- Gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data
- Identifying and understanding a variety of neurobehavioral diseases, as well as contemporary treatment options
- Critically evaluating scientific data
- Appraising and understanding ethical considerations of animal and human research
- Logical reasoning/critical/analytical thinking
- Operating scientific/lab equipment
- Creative thinking; problem solving skills; approaching topics and problems from various perspectives; analyzing multiple dimensions of a problem; identifying problems and developing solutions; decision making skills
- Teamwork skills: the ability to oversee, supervise and/or contribute to a project
- Independently working with little direction
- Data, time, and resource management
- Inspecting specimens
- Who is your greatest inspiration?
- Who in your life works a job that you think you’d like? What about it appeals to you?
- Who in your life works in a field you do not like? What don’t you like about it?
- What are the elements of that dream job that appeal to you most?
- What does this world need more of?
- What matters to you most in life and why?
- What does success look like to you in general?
- Is there anyone in your life you admire? Why? What do you admire about them?
- What do you hope to achieve in 5 years?
- Pretend time and money are no object…
- What does your contribution to the world look like and involve?
- What do you spend your days doing?
- How do you serve your community?
- Be as detailed and as imaginary (or not) as you wish! See if something surprises you if you just let yourself write out your wildest dreams…