Posted: September 13th, 2017

determine personal and professional goals

determine personal and professional goals

As you begin the journey into graduate education, you must first determine personal and professional goals. Take a moment and reflect on your decision to return to graduate school. What were the motivating factors: a better job, requirement for promotion, or desire for professional development?

Once you have identified your personal and professional goals, the next step is to identify strategies for success and potential barriers or obstacles to achieving success. Self-evaluation is an effective method used to raise awareness of your strengths and weaknesses and to assist in identifying barriers or obstacles that will impede success in graduate study.

It is not uncommon to experience some angst when making the decision to return to school. According to the literature, the most common barriers or obstacles to success in graduate study are prior commitments to work or family and time management. One major barrier to success in the online learning environment is the potential for procrastination. The decision to return to graduate school requires a serious commitment of time, and you must create a balance in your life between work, family, and social activities, while meeting the demands of school (Kramer, 2007; Morgenthaler, 2009).
An effective mechanism for decreasing the likelihood of procrastination is effective time management. One of the biggest obstacles to effective time management is underestimating the amount of time needed to meet graduate-course expectations. Finding time to devote to education can be overwhelming and takes effort on the part of the student (Morgenthaler, 2009). When you underestimate the time frame needed to provide a quality assignment and cannot meet a deadline, you become stressed. This is a sticky wicket; as you procrastinate and fall behind in assignments, your stress level becomes higher. This becomes a vicious cycle; the more the stress level increases, the more likely you are to use procrastination as an avoidance tactic or as a coping mechanism.
Once time is lost, it cannot be replaced or increased. An effective method for time management is to create a time-management calendar. The first step in the process is to determine how you truly spend your time. This requires some honest self-reflection. Once this is done, evaluate the results. Are there times when you are less productive? Are there more efficient ways to complete the tasks that you are assigned (Wild & Neville, 2008)?
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