Week 1 Reflection
Welcome to my little KIPP Blog everyone & hello there, visitor from the World Wide Web!
Welcome to my Knowledge Integration and Project Planning Blog which is part of a university course and a space for me to reflect on my learning and skills. It will help reinitiate why I’m doing this masters, how the courses and context will help me in my future aspirations and how all of this feeds into my final project. So let’s get started.
Week 1, Day 3 of starting my PG at UoE
To start this off, I will have a bit of a reflection of who I am as a person (aka my strengths and weaknesses) and why I have chosen this course (aka where I want to be in the future). Once that is done I can then combine my reflections to conclude how this course can help me get to where I want to be.
So starting off, I wasn’t sure how to best reflect on my own skills, strengths, weakness and habits. However, I decided to start at the very basics and use “the creative soft skills circle” to see where I place with regards to soft skills. The assessment was very easy to fill out (and super quick) and basically showed that my “Awareness, Communication, Problem solving and Leadership” skills are very present. “Creative thinking” was only “quite present” and “Learning-to-learn” does not seem to be very present.
Overall, these results are more or less what I suspected. However, I was surprised by how high I scored on “Problem solving” which is an area where I potentially underestimate myself. However, this might have just been a good chance to reminding myself that I do love problem solving and can use it to my advantage. Furthermore, I would love to use my creativity skills more. While many assessments in the past have been rather rigid, I hope to use the flexibility EFI provides to get more creative and really think outside of the box for my final project.
Right – moving on to hard skills. Having discussed various backgrounds of all the students in our module “interdisciplinary futures” today made me realise the areas I have gained hard skills from such as communication, marketing, linguistics, applied languages, cultural studies, diplomacy. More concretely, I have done ethnographic research, created marketing and communication campaigns (which is my current part-time job), investigated various languages and cultural phonenema, and written reports on politics. Furthermore, as part of my undergraduate dissertation I combined my passion for Intercultural Communication and Diplomacy and conducted some qualitative research.
However, I really want to add onto these hard skills and expand my horizons as much as possible. In particular, when it comes to data. I want to be able to do both qualitative and quantitative research and thoroughly understand the statistics behind it. Furthermore, Big data sets offer so many incredible opportunities for innovation, new information, research, new policies etc. that I want to learn how to use them to solve real world problems. And I want to bring them into relation with inequalities which lie at the heart of so many of our current problems.
Hence this all lead me to choosing my degree in “Data, Inequality and Society” rather than any of the other offers I had. I think what mostly struck me was being able to dive into so many different areas with this programme while getting a unique set of tools and cutting-edge skills which I hope will all prepare me in order to pursue a PhD in the future and also use my knowledge in practise in diplomatic work (of any shape or form).
That means, that I want to have a big focus on data which is why i chose modules such as “Insights through Data” or “Data Civis”, “Datafication, Accountability and Democracy”. I am immensely looking forward to these and to be equipped with the tools I want in the future. However, I do also think it will be a challenge. But I’m up for it! When it comes to spanning the link to diplomacy I have chosen modules such as “Migration and Forced Displacement in a Digital Age” or “Neuropolitics of Decision-making” and I hope to be able to apply my new knowledge in Exclusion and Inequalities to my prior experience to Diplomacy. This might provide me with insight of what can be changed in the future!
So to sum it up, I hope to get the skills to understand, analyse and represent data sets. And I hope to be able to use these insights practically with regards to issues such as health, inequality, climate change, science communication. With regards to soft skills, I hope to improve my interculturality skills since this course is highly international and I am always eager to learn as much as possible about new cultures. With regards to getting ideas for the final project, I think I just need to launch myself into my modules and see what content particularly strikes me as interesting (for instance, I am already utterly fascinated with all the data I am finding on the “Glasgow Effect” as part of my Exclusion and Inequality class). I will also note down ideas for my final project in form of mind-maps and then start discussing these with friends and family since it helps me to vocalise what’s on my mind. With regards to specific interests like for instance science communication I will look up reading lists for the MSc in Science Communication and Public Engagement and inform myself that way.
This is it – my first KIPP Blog post – my first reflection – and my first “roadmap” with regards to what I want to tackle next 🙂
Hi Kassandra… thank you for sharing your reflections with us. Since leaving university after my Bachelor’s and entering the world of work, I’ve realised just how important it is to understand data so I’ll be walking alongside you. At first it can be pretty scary but makes such a difference when you can draw your own conclusions and perspectives from a data set rather than having to be ‘told’ what something means.