Wesleyan students have free access to LinkedIn Learning and Coursera. For a list of suggested offerings, see the Ideals into Practice website. When choosing courses, consider length of time to complete (20 minutes? Two weeks?) and whether the content will help fill gaps or expand your knowledge in relation to the I2P competencies. NOTE: If you have not already taken Career Decisions: From Insight to Impact on Coursera—a four-week course offered by the GCC—its completion counts as all four modules. If you have any questions, please ask Sharon Belden Castonguay.
Use these pages to reflect on what you learned in each course or module.
So far, this course material has made me reflect on where I currently am in my academic and personal interests in addition to how I have made decisions in the past to get me where I am. Being in the fall semester of my second year of college, major declarations are right around the corner, and my future course load will need to reflect some kind of career direction. Right now, that makes me nervous because I am still unsure of what I want to do in the future. Every day, I think about what I want to do for the rest of my life, and depending on my state of mind, my answer is constantly changing. This skills module has made me realize that I have made many large decisions in my life that all served to prepare me for one of the biggest ones of my life, and it specifically has made me think about my biggest decision to date: my choice to attend Wesleyan.
I applied to many more schools than I should have, but the admissions process narrowed my decision down for me to 5 schools. I ended up at Wesleyan, and although I know that I have academic opportunities at this school that I couldn’t have had anywhere else I was accepted, I sometimes wonder whether I made the right decision. When making my decision, my health was better than it currently is, and I had so many lofty goals for the future (not that I’ve been able to narrow down many of those goals by now). I convinced myself that Wesleyan with its open curriculum and generous financial aid would be the best place for me.
I barely considered the social culture of college in my decision process. I assumed that I would be comfortable at Wesleyan. Reflecting on this made me realize that in my decision making, I often forget about the impact on my social and mental well-being while focusing more on what that decision would allow me to achieve. I am a more goal-oriented person who wants to do so many things that I tend to forget that I do have limits. This has led me to be more reflective on what a realistic academic study and career look like for me.
Another aspect of the way I look at decisions that stood out to me is my constant oscillating between wanting to broaden my interests and trying to narrow them. The jam story from module two made me think about how much easier it is to focus on a decision if I have only a few options to choose from. However, I do find myself becoming nervous or scared that I am not using my time at college to explore all of my interests by narrowing them down to a few options. I have not yet found a way to help myself find a balance between staying open to new interests and choosing a career path, but I am hoping that I will get closer to that as I move through these skills modules.
