As we mentioned in the project description, creating a plan for your career is like planning a journey. The clearer you can envision the destination, the easier it is to lay out the path in front of you. Throughout the last units, you explored your passions and interests as both a practitioner (Unit 1) and scholar (Unit 2) in the field. This assignment provides an opportunity to receive feedback to help you further clarify your vision and goals as a practitioner-scholar in the field of psychology. Complete the following:
Vision
Carve out a large block of time or many short segments of time over multiple days to reflect on your vision of the future. Use your description of your motivations during orientation and your completed Articulating Your Purpose activity as a starting point. Create a narrative that provides an inspiring description of your future career vision as a psychology practitioner-scholar. Use these questions to help guide your reflection:
• What impact do you want to make in the field of psychology?
• What are your passions and areas of interest within psychology?
• What might you like to learn more about through research and scholarship in the field?
• What would your practice of psychology look like?
• How does your master’s in psychology fit into your overall career vision?
• Do you know any psychology professionals in your desired career you would like to emulate?
• Imagine you have already achieved your future career vision. What did you accomplish?
Also, consider searching the Career Center, Capella Library, or the Internet for additional reflective exercises or inspiring ideas about creating a future career vision to help you brainstorm.
Goals
Once you create your vision as a psychology practitioner-scholar, it is time to translate that vision into specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely long-term goals to create milestones for a plan of action. Review your narrative and formulate personally meaningful and relevant educational, career, and life goals to achieve your vision. Here are a couple of examples to get you started:
• Earn my master’s degree in psychology in three years.
• Develop strategies to stay up to date and evaluate scholarly and professional literature and research related to key theories, authors, and best practices in technology-enhanced K–12 learning over the next three years.
• Accurately select, administer, score, and interpret psychological tests in the workplace in four years.
Consider reviewing the SMART Goals Presentation and searching the Capella Library or the Internet for additional reflective exercises or inspiring ideas about transforming your vision into actionable long-term goals.
Assignment Requirements
Your assignment should also meet the following requirements:
• Template: Use the Your Vision as a Psychology Practitioner-Scholar Template to format your assignment.
• Length: 2–3 typed and double-spaced, Times New Roman 12 point content pages (length excludes title page, abstract, and reference list).
• References: Your references may include both scholarly literature and practitioner sources.
• Written communication: Must be free of errors, scholarly, professional, and consistent with expectations for members of the profession of psychology.
• Writing Style: APA expectations for scholarly writing includes the use of third-person narrative, unless it is awkward to do so. Because you are talking about yourself in this paper, you may write in the first person.
• APA formatting: Must be formatted according to APA (6th edition) style and formatting and include a title page, abstract, table of contents, and reference list.
Use the Your Vision as a Psychology Practitioner-Scholar Scoring Guide to self-assess your completed assignment prior to turning it into your instructor for feedback to ensure you meet all evaluation criteria.
Note: Your instructor may also use the APA Writing Feedback Rubric to provide additional feedback on your academic writing. The writing feedback rubric does not affect your assignment grade, but its feedback may factor into the professional communication and writing grading criteria. Evaluate your own work using this rubric. Refer to the Learner Guide for instructions on viewing instructor feedback.