Week 8

     This final week of Interdisciplinary exercises will be about reflection. Reflection is a self-analysis of what was learned and discovered from a particular event. After taking the Capstone IDS class, I’ve learned that I think more systematic than empathetic. This is interesting to me because women tend to be more empathetic and men more systematic. This self-analysis has helped me reflect on the importance of empathy and how I interact with others. I consciously think of social encounters and think of the other person’s feelings more than I have before and have helped strengthen some relationships I have.

     For this exercise, I want you to reflect on what you have learned in your Cornerstone class. Write a brief summary of three things that you learned this past semester and how they may have changed the way you act, think, or may have even brought clarification to your areas of study.

    Then choose one of the following quizzes and right a brief summary of what you learned about yourself that you may not have realized. These exercises can help you think about areas in your life you would like to improve on or accentuate your strengths. 

Personality:

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

Systematic Thinking: www.tinyurl.com/7taj8

Empathetic Thinking: www.tinyurl.com/dbsd8

What type of animal are you?

http://www.serengetibook.com/your-safari/what-animal-am-i/quiz/
or
http://www.youthink.com/quiz.cfm?action=go_detail&sub_action=take&obj_id=1442

Denise vonGartzen 

Topic 7: Resume Workshop

Hi Cornerstone students, my name is Amanda Tellez and the topic for this week will be “Resumes.”

As you all know resumes are a very important aspect of finding a job so this week we are going to help you build an effective resume. Many of you may already have a resume and that is great, we will just work to perfect it. Here are this week’s activities:

Activity 1:
If you don’t have one already, draft a rough resume. (Here is a really good website that will help you create or perfect your resume. You can use one you have already started or start from scratch. http://www.livecareer.com/resume-builder ) It doesn’t have to be perfect but it will get you started. After you draft a rough copy upload it into your Skydrive in your UCF email account. Make sure you share the file as a link and post that link into your comments to this topic so we can review it and make suggestions. Then answer these questions:

A. What makes a resume stand out (in either a good or a bad way?)

B. What do you want your resume to say about YOU?

Activity 2:
Take a look at the career services handouts website: http://www.career.ucf.edu/Students/Undergraduate_Students/Write_Effective_Resumes_and_Cover_Letters/Handouts_49_193.aspx and answer the following:

A. Which handouts were most helpful? Least helpful? Explain why or why not.

Mentoring Group 8

You have scored the interview!!! Now what…..

Greetings Cornerstone students! I hope everyone is doing well half way through the semester. I am Melissa King and my areas of concentration for my IDS degree are Education and Public Affairs with a minor in Woman’s Studies. Although my areas of concentration might be very different from each other, I hope to use my degree to assist me in continuing my military career or help me to establish a solid foundation for a master’s degree.  I am looking forward to graduation this coming spring and seeing how I can use my degree in a professional setting.

This week we will focus on a professional setting. More specifically, we will be focusing on our initial communication in a professional setting with a perspective employer. If you haven’t guessed it yet, I am talking about going to an interview. For many of us an interview is our opportunity to give a great first impression and allow our professional skills and abilities to shine, therefore leaving a memorable impression on our potential employer.

Indeed, interviews can make or break our professional experience at times.  Interviews can manifest in a variety of settings such as a one-on-one interview, a panel interview, a phone interview, or several rounds of interviews. Our communication skills, both verbal and non-verbal, must be exemplary and we must enter each encounter with confidence, ease, and positivity. This often takes adequate preparation.

Activity:

You will have a chance to complete a mock “perfect interview”. Please follow the steps closely.

1. Click on the link: http://www.perfectinterview.com/ucf/
2. Go to create a new account
3. Put in the required information and enter in your g-mail email account.
4. Check your email account for password information and follow the link to complete your interview.
5.  Once completed, reflect on the interview. Write a paragraph to describe how you did and answer some of the following questions.  Did you handle the questions well? Interviews can come in various forms. How would you deal with a phone interview of a panel interview? When would be a good time to talk about salary? Post this paragraph with your reply after completing the exercises below.

Exercise 1:

·          Reflect on past interview(s) that you have gone on. What are some areas you feel were positive points in your interview? What are some areas you could have worked on? What did you learn from the experience(s)? NOTE: If you have never gone on an interview please reflect on what concerns you might have about your first interview.

Exercise 2:
 Non- verbal communication plays a large part in the interview process. As an exercise, the next time you speak to a friend or a family member, focus on your non-verbal communication. Take note of the following: How did you position yourself? Did you use a lot of gestures? What were your facial expressions like? Did you make eye contact? Keep in mind these are non-verbal communications in a less formal setting. How might you be able to use appropriate non-verbal communication in an interview setting?

Make sure that you post your responses as comments to this blog post and not as a brand new post. Again, be sure any responses to a particular person’s post are done as a reply to that person’s post and not a brand new comment. This helps keep the conversation going. Feel free to respond to more than one post if you have something to share. As always, reach out to the mentors through the comments and we will reply as quickly as possible. We look forward to learning and sharing more with you this week.

- Group 8 Mentors

Personal/Professional Opportunities and Job Skills

Welcome back Cornerstone students. My name is Kiticha Sapp and the topic for this week focuses on “Personal/Professional Opportunities and Job Skills.” I know that you probably feel overwhelmed with everything that you have to consume in your cornerstone class. I felt the same way the first couple of weeks. So just relax and remember that in the end you will have gained knowledge that will help you with your career. I hope that you have enjoyed the blogs so far and have gained useful information that will prepare you for your future.

This week’s activities will focus on “Personal/Professional Opportunities and Job Skills.” Please answer in complete sentences.

Instructions for activity 1: Create a personal/professional plan in 1-2 paragraphs

1: State your Personal/Professional Goal in 2-3 sentences
2: In 1-2 sentences list the skills and knowledge that you have already acquired to help you reach this goal.
3: In 1-2 sentences list the skills and/or knowledge you still need to acquire to attain this goal.
4: Who can help me accomplish my personal/professional plan and how, specifically, can I call on them for help? ( Mentors, family, peers, etc.)
5: Research one professional organization or club you could join that aligns with your IDS focus areas. Which organization/club would you join and how would membership help you accomplish your personal/professional goal?

Instructions for activity 2: Job Skills: Provide a 1-2 paragraph answer using the prompts below.

1: List your 3 strongest job skills?
2: List your 3 weakest job skills?
3: Describe how you can improve your weakest job skills.
4: Do you have a professional job history that has contributed toward meeting your goal? If so, what is it?

Interdisciplinarity in the real world

Hello Cornerstone Students! My name is Julissa, and my areas of concentrations are Mass Communications, Letters & Languages and a minor in Psychology. I chose these areas because these three compliment each other in every way. The minor assists me with understanding the way people think and why they make choices. Letters & Languages gives me the understanding of how to get my message across in writing, since mass communications consists of a ton of writing. And lastly, I love relationship building through communication, which is why this area fits me like a glove!

    This week we will complete an exercise that will give each of you the ability to exchange ideas on how we can apply our areas of development.

Activity:  Please read this quote as it helped me a lot in being able to define my degree to everyone that asked, ‘What is your degree good for?”

"When I try to explain Interdisciplinarity to prospective students and their parents I usually use [this] analogy. A building is made up of bricks and mortar. But most of us think of the bricks as being the real building and, in fact, you could pile up bricks without mortar and make something that looks like a building but which wouldn't function as well.  The mortar by itself would also not make a very useful building - although you probably could pile it up in such a way as to make some thing that looked like an igloo or something.
The success of the building is the bricks and the mortar; the bricks are the bones, the structure, of the building - the mortar is the connection between the bricks that holds the building together.  I [compare] the disciplinary programs to the bricks - they're something solid and with which people are familiar - they look like a building.  The disciplines, Art, German, Biology, Music, Mathematics, Economics, etc look like a University - they're the familiar areas of study that people associate with higher education.  The Interdisciplinary programs are more like the mortar - they're the intellectual and academic areas between the disciplines that link them together, that give them solidity and function, and give them a context."

Exercise #1 (please answer the following questions in a 200 word response):
How do you apply your interdisciplinarity in daily situations?

What is interdisciplinarity not? Is it just focus in one direct area?

Who do you know who has an interdisciplinary profession? What do they do, and is their profession what convinced you to go the interdisciplinary direction?

4.How are you integrating your disciplines or are you? If you are not, how could you integrate them more in your coursework or career?

What are some opportunities (personal, professional or educational) that can increase our interdisciplinarity?

Exercise #2:

After you have completed the reading and exercise #1, please comment to the student that posted before you..:: If you are the first to respond please comment to the last student and vice versa.:: 

Topic 3: Critical Thinking

Welcome back cornerstone students. My name is Mark Walker and I will be working with you this week to explore critical thinking skills. This is a skill that we use everyday in every aspect of our lives. A basic definition of critical thinking is the ability to take information and make educated decisions without the influence of your own views. In other words, the capability to engage in introspective and objective thought.

Someone with critical thinking skills will:

• Understand the logical connections between ideas
•  Identify, construct and evaluate arguments
• Detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning
• Solve problems systematically
• Identify the relevance and importance of ideas
• Reflect on the justification of one's own beliefs and values 

Activity:

In this week’s activity we will apply these proficiencies.

First, visit the virtual philosopher website at http://web.uncg.edu/dcl/courses/ethicsTechnology/video/VP/ethics_vp4/vp4.html and answer the questions that the virtual philosopher poses. After completing this exercise, please use the prompts below as jumping off points to share your perspectives on critical thinking in 4-5 well-developed paragraphs.

• How were you scored and did your answers favor, need, equality or merit? Does this align with your personal beliefs? How? If not, why? If the virtual philosopher considers your score “inconsistent”, do you agree with his statement that you probably, “picked your answers based upon what sounded good at the time without much thought for consistency?” Why or why not? Were you surprised by how you were scored, why or why not?

• Why do you evaluate ethical situations like those presented by the virtual philosopher in the way that you do?

• The virtual philosopher examines the interplay of ethics and critical thinking. As discussed above, skills of a critical thinker include identifying, constructing and evaluating arguments and reflecting on the justification of one’s own beliefs and values. With this in mind, let’s take this a step further and examine another hypothetical situation:

You are a psychologist and a long-time patient reveals that they are a murderer and confesses their crimes to you. They continue by saying they won’t/haven’t killed again. The oath you took declares that a therapist should keep everything a client shares with you confidential unless he/she is an immediate threat to themselves or others. After spending many months treating this client, it is clear to you that they are not a threat. What would you do and why?

• How has your experience as an IDS student enhanced your critical thinking skills? What about IDS studies encourages critical thinking? How do you think this will help you in your future endeavors like graduate school or your professional career?

• Reply to at least one other student’s response. You can discuss their insights on the Virtual Philosopher activity, their response to the hypothetical situation, their ideas about critical thinking or any combination of the three.

Please take the time to really think about your responses and examine them using the critical thinking skills described in the bullet points above before posting. Also, please be sure to keep an open mind about each other’s responses. We all might not have the same opinions, but all responses should be balanced and logical. 

As mentors we are here to try and guide you through these activities, so please ask us any questions you may have, our opinions, our experiences or anything else that may help enhance this activity.

Make sure that you post your responses as comments to this blog post and not as a brand new post. Again, be sure any responses to a particular person’s post are done as a reply to that person’s post and not a brand new comment. This helps keep the conversation going. I encourage you to respond to more than one post if you are so inclined and if someone responds to your comments attempt to engage them in further conversation and/or respond to their thoughts about your post.

I’ll leave you with this one last thought. Daniel Pink points out in his book, A Whole New Mind, that today’s knowledge economy is rapidly changing. This new economy will demand that workers are able to think creatively on their feet and synthesize many disparate pieces of information into new ideas. These skills are enhanced by well-developed critical thinking skills. So it is important to take the opportunities we have to further develop and fine-tune them.

We look forward to reading and responding to your responses this week and learning more about you and your critical thinking skills.

- Mark Walker

References:

Critical thinking bullet points were found here: http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/critical/ct.php

Topic Two - Integrating Your Areas of Study

Hello, my name is Nicole Camire. Welcome to the second week of our discussions. I will be the mentor in charge of this week’s blog.  Last week we learned a little bit about each other and what our interests were by describing ourselves with using the letters of our first name. We also discussed our focus areas and minor. This week we will focus on how your areas of study integrate by incorporating some of the ideas you developed last week in part two of the activity.

Activity Part 1:

We would like you to create a Venn diagram that indicates your areas of study and minor. In the areas inside the Venn diagram where your focus areas and minor intersect, list in a few words 2 ways they integrate. As you can see in the example provided below public relations and advertising integrate in the messaging stage of their work, while PR and marketing integrate more so when developing content. Most important is the center of the circle where all of your areas of study intersect. You can see here that PR, marketing and advertising all integrate through audience engagement. Make sure you list at least two ways all your areas study integrate in this center circle (what commonalities do they share?).

After completing your Venn diagram upload it to your Skydrive in your UCF email account. Make sure to share the file as a link and post that link in your comments to this topic so the mentors and other mentees can view it. Respond to the following question in 2-3 paragraphs in the same post.

1. Explain your Venn diagram noting the specific strengths of how the focus areas and minor build off each other as well as any weaknesses or ways they lack integration. Are your focus areas a natural fit for each other? If not, what are some ways you could make them better integrate? How do your focus areas combine in ways that will help you in your future professional, academic and personal development?

Activity Part 2:

Please read your classmates' posts and respond to at least one other student by providing your own unique insights on their ideas about integration in 1-2 paragraphs.

Make sure that you post your response as a comment to this blog post and not as a brand new post. Again, be sure any responses to a particular person’s post are done as a reply to that person’s post and not a brand new comment. This helps keep the conversation going and more natural. Feel free to respond to more than one post if you have something to share. As always, reach out to the mentors through the comments and we will reply as quickly as possible. We will also be reading and responding to your posts throughout the week. We look forward to learning and sharing more with you about integration.

- Group 8 Mentors