Career Mentoring and Professional Identity Development

CS 386-01 • Fall 2021

Reflection #1

Before you begin, review the general instructions for completing reflection exercises.

Write a 250-350 word journal reflection on the following set of questions.

It is important that you take time to reflect on these questions before writing your responses. Please read all the questions in one sitting and write your responses later, ex: you could read the questions on one day and write the responses the following day. While you can answer each question directly, you can also write a flowing entry that captures all the questions together in a few paragraphs. Don’t feel obligated to answer each and every question exactly. Read all the questions completely before answering them.

The goal of this reflection is to learn about yourself, imagine your future, and how it feels to you.

  1. What jobs/roles do you see yourself working in computer science?
    • Explain what parts of these jobs attract you to it, such as how the workplace acts/looks, who you imagine working with, what projects you imagine working on, the salary and benefits of that particular job, etc.
  2. Think back to when you were in high school and interested in computer science or technology, what jobs did you dream to do?
    • If you were not interested in this type of work in high school: What type of career were you interested in pursuing?
  3. Why has your list changed since high school?
  4. If you could do any job on your list, which is the one you want to do the most? Why?
  5. Which job do you think you will get hired for when you graduate college? Why?
  6. Which job do you think you will have 5 years after graduating? Why?
  7. What experiences contributed to your decision to pursue computer science?
  8. How were you influenced by others?
  9. Explain one memorable story about how you came to study computer science.
  10. What did people close to you (Family/Teachers/Peers/ Culture) say to you as you were pursuing computer science and/or math, science, technology?