Morgan shares her setbacks and successes within completing her practicum for the Impact Monterey County. She concludes the article with valuable tips for future MIIS students completing a practicum. … Continue reading Finding Eureka Moments Motivates One Further in their Challenging Practicum [Morgan Moore MPA/IT ’22]
Completing my Practicum project was one of the most challenging tasks I’ve ever taken on. I am thankful to my Practicum professor, Dr. Mahabat Baimyrzaeva, and Kalyssa King at Impact Monterey County for their guidance and support throughout the entire learning journey. My learning journey was not at all linear or easy.
These “eureka!” moments, which were both liberating and frustrating, caused me to refine and sharpen the initial goals and objectives of my project.
At several times in the development of my deliverable, I found myself going back and metaphorically retracing my steps to an earlier step that was evolving and being reshaped by new knowledge. These “eureka!” moments, which were both liberating and frustrating, caused me to refine and sharpen the initial goals and objectives of my project. Overall, I found the project enlightening.
I realized that I have issues with the iterative nature of applied learning. The iterative nature of the work requires patience and trust in the process which I admittedly struggle with. However, I did enjoy the feeling of co-creation with my client, that we were both excited by the twists and turns the assignment entailed. To summarize my reflection I want to give some tips to future Practicum students on how to get the most out of their experience:
- Find an accountability partner. This stretches beyond the basic requirement of peer feedback and enables you to rely on and be accountable to someone other than Maha for meeting your milestones and deadlines. You could schedule Pomodoro study sessions with this person or ask them the “stupid questions.” You can bounce ideas off of them and experiment. The person does not have to have a similar project as yours — just the motivation to deliver a high quality product!
- Take advantage of office hours with Maha early on in the semester. I fell into the trap of waiting until my project was in good shape (nearly perfect even!) to schedule a one-on-one meeting with Maha. Well, my project never got to that point and it was April; I’d made a huge mistake waiting so long without getting feedback on my processes! I regret waiting to reach an unrealistic, imaginary goal to talk with my Practicum professor and discuss my progress/room for improvement. I think about what my process/my project could have been had I just reached out sooner and scheduled some time. Nevertheless, I am still proud of my deliverable and am thankful that Maha was able to turn me around in such a short amount of time. But don’t do what I did! Don’t wait!
- Trust the process. The twists, the turns, the sudden plummeting drops, everything! All the experiences, both the good and the bad, but especially the bad, are intended to make you a better development professional down the road. Exercise patience and gratitude. Ask questions without the answers already in mind. Extend grace.
Good luck to future Practicum students and congratulations on your learning journey!
You must be logged in to post a comment.