A skill that my concentration in particular has helped me to develop is to “give it a try”. It is difficult to be planning in advance something as significant as the next two and a half years of my schooling, so the process could have very easily shut me down without letting me figure out what I wanted to do. I could have taken myself in a direction that I really didn’t want to be going. Instead, by thinking back to what I have liked over the past few semesters, the content in which I excelled, or which pushed me the hardest, I was able to find a direction that I was interested in and proud of.
I knew that I was learning how to try things out and keep going when I had almost completely written my concentration proposal for the first time. People would read it, say it looked good, congratulate me on being almost done. But I waited to turn it in. I kept pushing myself and went through the entire process again, trying to find a concentration that I would worked hard for. In the end, I used the bases of my original proposal, but taking the extra time was invaluable to my end product. I had introduced an entirely new side of my concentration that I hadn’t thought about before, and it was all because I had taken a little extra time to read new material and rework my writing.
Being able to publish the final version of my concentration proposal will help to show the end product of my thinking over the last few months, but I would also like to show how I came to that conclusion. I have struggled to properly evidence my thinking on my site, but this growth is exactly what I need to show. By demonstrating to myself that I can keep trying and keep writing to develop my concentration, I am beginning to push myself to continue trying with evidence posts to share the ways in which I process the information that we are learning in class.