Personal Narrative: My Ultimate Career Goals

Along with creating steps which will lead me towards my ultimate career goal, the creation of a specific five-year plan for myself was key. In five years I will be in school, hopefully in my final year of my Masters degree; a plan which seems so simple to achieve, however requires an extensive amount of hard work and dedication. Being so far in my academic career already, I will hopefully have worked in summer internships or been employed during the year by a speech-language pathologist or various health institutions to gain experience in the profession and potentially become full time employed by one of these institutions post-graduation. Within the five years, I will have as well established networks and built relationships with multiple

people within the field, allowing me to develop mentors and determine which people I would like to emulate.
A family friend is speech-language pathologist and I would describe her as a role model to me. She has worked in the field for many years and is extremely established, having worked in hospitals, self-employed and within the government. This has resulted in many goals which she has achieved in her career, making her someone to look up to. I would describe her as someone who is like myself in that we are both hard working, driven and social with others around us. For this reason, I would prefer to learn from someone like her who shares qualities with me as it would be easier for me to imagine myself more realistically within the profession.
Reflecting on all her accomplishments, inspired me to begin thinking past a five-year plan and a ten-year plan for myself was created.

It includes the same beginning aspects of my five-year plan however adding the aspects of having graduated with a Masters degree and having four years of work experience as a speech language pathologist. Along with the professional aspect of my life within the next decade, I also plan to establish a work-life-family balance, as I want to get married and start a family as well. This adds many challenges as my plan now involves others, however it is my ultimate goal. Although thinking this far in advance has many positive effects; it allows you to set short term and long term goals, lets you see an over view of how you envision your life within the given time frame and also provides you with the ability to time-manage to avoid potential stress, it also has many negatives too. For example, life is never as perfect as we plan out and many challenges which steer individuals in various directions occur creating an added pressure for the individual to actually complete the goal by the given time which causes additional stress. However, besides the pros and cons of planning one’s future, I strongly believe it has many benefits which outweigh the disadvantages and ultimately allow for greater levels of

organization.
Although planning one’s future tends to be a relatively personal thought process, having the research of other class members accessible to all on the wiki made the idea of collaborative work a much easier and an extremely beneficial aspect of designing my future. It was valuable to see what others in the class were searching and finding similarities between my research and theirs or having access to other insights which my research failed to include. Also, having extra sources to potentially incorporate into this essay, by reading the annotations of my peers. Having this ability to share information amongst peers enables an additional outside of class learning sector, as we can draw from the findings of others and learn from them; either towards academic work, or as advice for life in general. Furthermore, as we progress into a more technologically dependant society, I do believe that online platforms, such as a wiki, add to the learning experience. It can be used in various aspects, for students to pose questions and for others to answer, or to share interesting information with peers. Especially seeing how university classes are made up of students from all walks of life, these tools allow the students to stay connected before and after class time, enhancing the learning of the material that much more.
The CCR199 digital humanities seminar class has become one of my favourite courses thus far for many reasons. For one, it introduced me to many tools and ways of searching for relevant material (through tools such as Voyant and TAPoR), which I know I will use throughout the rest of my university experience, in addition to learning a lot about myself – especially through this final assignment. The most significant take-away I have from this semester is having a clear understanding of what I want to achieve during my time at the University of Toronto. Identifying my skills which led to the epiphany of a career path, followed by setting goals and figuring out solutions on how to reach them and ending with a five and ten-year plan of my future; an idea no other university course would have allowed me to do. It allowed me to explore the endless possibilities of university, always shining light on finding a final result. I also learned many things about myself as a student, and believe that I have grown even within the short few months of the class’ duration. As an anonymous author once said; “success doesn’t just happen. It’s planned for.” 5