Personal Development Planning

Accomplishments, skills, values and contacts

(1)     ACADEMIC INTERESTS AND ACTIVITIES

List the course options you have selected this year (if appropriate) and the areas of research or independent study you have chosen to pursue, together with any scholarly activities you have undertaken outside your academic programme such as journal publications, participation in conferences or seminars. Give reasons for your programme choices, and outline the requirements that both these choices and other academic activities have made of you: did they require good time-management, strong data-processing skills, or an ability to think ‘outside the box’, for example?

(2)     CO-CURRICULAR INTERESTS AND ACTIVITIES

List the co-curricular activities which you have undertaken as an adult such as sports, drama, student or local politics, student or local media, travel. Explain the nature of your involvement in these activities, and the demands placed on you: did they require good interpersonal skills, a marked degree of responsibility, or a strong sense of initiative, for example?

(3)     WORK EXPERIENCE

List any experience you have had of a working environment, whether it was as part of your academic programme or before arriving at Royal Holloway, during a vacation or during term-time, paid or voluntary. Include the dates of your employment, the name of the employer and a summary of what you did, what you learned from the experience, and which of the insights and skills you gained you might draw on in the future.

 (4)    OTHER COURSES OR QUALIFICATIONS

List any professional or post-secondary academic qualifications you hold other than degrees, together with any courses taken other than those required by your degree programmes, such as language or computing courses. Comment on your reasons for taking these qualifications or courses, and their relevance to your past, present or future development.

(5)     VALUES AND PRIORITIES

List your current academic and developmental priorities, and provide a brief description of the processes by which you have arrived at them. If there are any elements of your previous educational, professional or domestic experience that have shaped those priorities, explain what those are. If you hold any values that would prevent or encourage you from pursuing particular professional or academic pathways, explain what those are.

(6)     PERSONAL SKILLS AND COMPETENCIES

                     

            List your strongest skills and competencies (both academic and non-academic), as well as those you have developed over the course of the past year. Explain whether the latter are new skills, or whether you have built on previous experience (in say, team work or oral presentation) in order to develop them. List any skills you feel you still need to acquire or enhance, and summarize your plans for doing so.

(7)     CONTACTS AND CONNECTIONS

List the areas of your life (e.g. academic, professional, leisure)  in which you feel you have made a significant number of new contacts, as well as those in which you have maintained connections with a range of individuals. If you have not already done so, explain the role played by other people in each of the categories above: did they assist you in your academic or co-curricular activities, offer you opportunities for work experience, or help you to improve a particular skill, for example?

(8)     LONG-TERM ASPIRATIONS, OBJECTIVES AND DEVELOPMENT

            List here, if you can, the professional avenues you are considering pursuing after you have completed your academic programme, together with any general aspirations and objectives you have for your development over the next two to five years. Explain the rationale behind your choices.