From Flaticon, one of many resources available to you online.
Previously: Telling your story, or at least a part of it.
The short version of this post: Use your creativity and insight to build a personal SWOT analysis for the rest of the year. Follow any of the hundreds of guides out there:
The long version of this post will show you how to do this well.
To create the best version of you, you must have a blueprint. You’ve done work like this already, but there is always more to do. You need to think divergently. One way to do this is to expand your “network of possible wanderings,” a term used by Teresa Amabile to define expertise:
Expertise encompasses everything that a person knows and can do in the broad domain of his or her work. Take, for example, a scientist at a pharmaceutical company who is charged with developing a blood-clotting drug for hemophiliacs. Her expertise includes her basic talent for thinking scientifically as well as all the knowledge and technical abilities that she has in the fields of medicine, chemistry, biology, and biochemistry. It doesn’t matter how she acquired this expertise, whether through formal education, practical experience, or interaction with other professionals. Regardless, her expertise constitutes what the Nobel laureate, economist, and psychologist Herb Simon calls her “network of possible wanderings,” the intellectual space that she uses to explore and solve problems. The larger this space, the better.
The emphasis is on the idea that everyone has an “intellectual space” that is used to solve problems and to think critically and creatively. That space grows over time, but only when you work to expand it. The boundaries of the space are determined by what you already know, which you can imagine as a “network” of subjects, understandings, and interests. As you increase what you know, your potential increases, too. Amabile’s next paragraph offers examples of this kind of work:
Creative thinking, as noted above, refers to how people approach problems and solutions — their capacity to put existing ideas together in new combinations. The skill itself depends quite a bit on personality as well as on how a person thinks and works. The pharmaceutical scientist, for example, will be more creative if her personality is such that she feels comfortable disagreeing with others — that is, if she naturally tries out solutions that depart from the status quo. Her creativity will be enhanced further if she habitually turns problems upside down and combines knowledge from seemingly disparate fields. For example, she might look to botany to help find solutions to the hemophilia problem, using lessons from the vascular systems of plants to spark insights about bleeding in humans.
The emphasis this time invites you to change your perspective within your own intellectual space as easily as you change it when looking at optical illusions or inkblots. Your combined knowledge affects how you might look at yourself more critically or tell a story about who you are.
You can read the rest of Amabile’s article online at The Harvard Business Review, if you are interested in how organizations build or stifle creativity. In our class, it’s a helpful metaphor — you are the organization yourself. You are looking at how you encourage your own creativity within those fields you wander.
Personal SWOT Analysis
Your assignment after reading this lecture is to create a personal, academic SWOT analysis. You want to expand your “network of possible wanderings” while avoiding the threats that crop up throughout any school year. Certainly the next few months will have their share of hazards. Start with what a “SWOT analysis” is and what it requires. Here is a detailed article:
And here is a two-minute video:
You’re in school, so you just need to adjust the language here — which is specific to people in careers and businesses — so that it fits academics. Use your common sense to do this, or ask for help making the transference. Once you have the overall gist, you should select a template. You can create your own, search online for a model, or use one of the ones prepared for you. Templates drawn from this site have been reorganized and reformatted for ease of use:
Make a copy of any templates in the folder that you’d like to use. You could also use Canva, if you feel more comfortable with that:
Finally, you want to use the appropriate language for this analysis. That means looking at the universal skills and traits expected of all graduates. This is what your school expects you to look like when you graduate, so these are the categories you must use: