personal reflection essay

he reflective essay will ultimately be the primary component of your senior portfolio a few years from now. Think of this essay as your opportunity to describe and document your growth as a person during this time in your life. Thought of this way, the essay should ultimately reflect the person who wrote it, and it should eventually demonstrate the maturity and development it intends to describe. It should be creative. It should have a clear and authentic voice—your voice. It should allow its readers a candid view of the person you have become during your college experience. To begin this four-year process of reflection, the essay you write at the end of your freshman year should be as honest and as authentic as you can make it at this point.

 

Students sometimes confuse reflection with “reaction” or “response.” To document your reaction or response to an experience would be to document how you feel about it or to describe the emotional or practical impact the experience had on you. Reflection, as we’re using the term here, is something more than this. To reflect on your experiences is really to engage in an intellectual exercise whereby you review in detail what you know (what you’ve read, or learned, or observed, or felt, or experienced) and then draw some conclusions about the experience’s significance in relation to the context of your life as a whole. The process involves your actions and emotions, certainly, but true reflection occurs as a result of thoroughly considering and understanding the significance of those thoughts, emotions, and experiences rather than merely charting or labeling them.

 

As you reflect on your experiences over the past year, you should try to imagine the person you were when you arrived here just a few months ago. Think about the many ways your life has changed since that moment. Ask yourself how much you have learned over the past few months, both in and out of the classroom. Ask yourself how much you may have matured emotionally. Ask yourself how you may have grown spiritually or ethically. Ask yourself how you may have come to better understand your place in society, your social roles and responsibilities. You are probably a very different person from the one who arrived here in August of last year—more experienced, less naïve and uncertain--and the reflective essay gives you an opportunity to describe the journey’s beginning, to begin to document the story, of the metamorphosis you will continue to experience as your college career unfolds. And remember that what we are discussing here is not merely a listing of activities or a cataloging of experiences. Growth and maturity are not simply the result of doing activities and checking items off a list. Growth and maturity result from changes in perception. And it is these changes in perception that should guide the writing of your essay.

 
Your Range of Experience

 

As you think about what sorts of things to say in your reflective essay, think of the many aspects of your educational experience. There are the courses you took, obviously, as well as the books you read, the lectures you heard, the programs you attended. These are all good places to begin. What are the key ideas, possibly in your major as well as your general education courses, that have shaped or reshaped your thinking over the past few months? What are the key ideas that you suspect will continue to shape your life and thought in the future? What are some of the fundamental concepts and beliefs that are informing the sensibility, or the values, you are developing at this point in your life? 

 

Also, as you reflect on your freshman year, remember there are many experiences beyond academic examples: experiences in extra-curricular organizations and activities; experiences while thinking and planning for life after college; and experiences while engaging in service learning. In fact, some portion of your essay should be devoted exclusively to reflection on your service learning experiences, with the emphasis of course on learning. It isn’t just about the benefits you receive from the experience, after all. It’s also about the many ways in which service learning opens your eyes to the larger community around you and to the people in that community.  

 
Special Emphasis for Freshmen: Reflection

 

At the end of your freshman year, the personal essay you compose should emphasize and demonstrate your understanding of the importance of reflection, including service learning reflection, and its value to you as a tool for understanding and documenting your development as a person. Having experiences and doing activities are important aspects of your life, but it is the thought you give to those experiences that helps you learn and grow as a person. Putting things into perspective, fitting your experiences, as well as the ideas you encounter, into the larger context of your life is what your education is all about.  

 

The personal essay you compose at the end of your freshman year should be a discussion of the overall nature of the college experience and the impact that it is having on you. You may discuss the importance of goal setting and planning as a key element in your ongoing development. You may discuss ideas you encountered, in or outside the classroom, and your reaction to those ideas. You may discuss your interaction with people (in either a private or public sphere) and the lessons you learned from the interaction. Whatever you choose to discuss, make sure you spend time thinking about the experience and trying to make sense of it in the larger context of who you are. 

 

In the same way, you should also consider the nature of reflection in terms of its relationship to the four dimensions of the Personal Development Program itself. How would you reflect differently when it comes to the issue of your ethical awareness and development versus, say, the issue of your intellectual growth and maturity? How does reflection as a process differ from one dimension of your life to another and what may those differences suggest?  

 
Supporting Materials and Documentation

 

As you organize your discussion, think about illuminating your text with outside material, outside documentation. If you think of the reflective essay as an “argument” for who you are becoming, then it seems appropriate to have some evidence to support your position, to add dimension to the text you are creating. This might take the form of footnotes describing some event this past year or explaining or highlighting a specific idea you discuss in your essay. It might take the form of photographs, or certificates, or physical items. It might take the form of written documentation such as forms, or letters, or charts and tables. It might take a more creative form and include artwork or poetry or music. Whatever it is you gather as supporting material for your reflective essay, make sure that you discuss the items in the essay itself and that they have some special meaning to you. If it is something that would likely be thrown away, then you probably shouldn’t include it. A ticket stub or a playbill is unlikely to have the significance to you that a photograph of friends and co-workers or a certificate of achievement might. Let your memory be the measure. If the material were something you would ordinarily keep as a memento or keepsake, then it would probably work well as supporting material for your reflective essay.

 
What the Reflective Essay Isn’t

 

The reflective essay isn’t an empty exercise to fulfill a PDP requirement. The goal isn’t simply to make extra work for the first-year student. No, the reflective essay is your opportunity to actually reflect on your experiences, to try and make some clear, unified sense of the many experiences you have had this past year. This reflection on who you are, on who you are becoming, will eventually be enormously valuable to you as you continue on to your sophomore, junior, and senior years and beyond.

 

The reflective essay isn’t merely a listing of activities and growth in four discrete areas. Instead, the reflective essay should be a unified and coherent vision of the person you are becoming. Yes, you will discuss your development in the four distinctive areas of your life that have been identified in the PDP program—intellectual growth, emotional maturity and physical health, ethical and spiritual growth, and citizenship and community responsibility. But you shouldn’t discuss these areas in some kind of mechanical, checklist fashion. Remember that growth and maturity aren’t the result of doing activities in discrete categories and checking items off a list. Growth and maturity result from changes in perception, and it’s these changes in perception that you are trying to document.

 

The reflective essay isn’t a personal confessional. While it is true that the document you write is personal, it need not be overly confidential. What we want is something that describes your maturity and growth—and sometimes that may mean saying things that are not intended to be common knowledge. That’s fine. It is even expected to some degree. But the essay should also reflect enough maturity to understand basic social boundaries when discussing one’s own life in a public forum such as this.

 
Some Ideas and Strategies for Discussion in the Various Dimensions

 

Below are several suggestions for writing about each of the PDP dimensions to prompt your thinking as you decide the sorts of things to include in your essay. Remember, however, that your essay will be evaluated as a coherent and unified vision of how you’ve grown and who you’ve become. Answering these prompts in a rote fashion will not be sufficient in developing your essay:

 
Identify the two most meaningful courses you took this year and explore 

how they prompted you to think in new ways, excite you, or “open your eyes” to  

unfamiliar aspects of the world around you.

 
Examine any two courses you took this year and discuss how ideas presented in one course applied or was useful in the second.  

 
Discuss what you think it means to be attending a “liberal arts” college.  

 

· Discuss how your coursework this year connected to the co-curricular activities you engaged in, or to your service learning experiences, or to other aspects of your life.

 

· Discuss how your growth and development has been influenced by your own self-initiated inquiries through such activities as leisure reading, cross-cultural or travel experiences, visits to museums or historical sites, or attendance at concerts and theatrical or operatic performances.

 

· Respond directly to a specific idea that troubles or intrigues you, or respond directly to a work of art or a novel or a scientific concept which had an influence on your thinking.

 

· Respond to a specific public figure who troubles or intrigues you, examining the qualities that you admire or qualities that you find abhorrent and discuss how your judgment relates to your overall education.

 

· Examine the relationship of your education to your intended or desired career path, looking at such issues as preparation and suitability to the job. Explain in what ways you hope your education will enhance your performance on the job.

 

· Discuss the methods you used to examine and evaluate your emotional and physical health over the past year.

 

· Discuss the various aspects of your education which facilitated growth in terms of emotional or physical maturity and health.

 

· Identify any areas of your behavior which needed modification and discuss how you achieved or did not achieve the desired behavior.

 

· Describe your sensibility as a person—what are your feelings about things and what role do those feelings play in your decision-making and thought?

 

· Examine and discuss how you’ve changed over the past year in terms of handling situations involving other people, either personally or socially.

 

· Examine and discuss the way you’ve changed over the past year in terms of how you relate to the larger community.

 

· Examine how your spiritual beliefs and attitudes changed during your first year at college. Ask yourself whether the changes surprised you, discomforted you, or satisfied you. 

 

· Discuss the most significant ethical challenge or dilemma you confronted during the past year. Explain what you learned about yourself and others from this experience.

 

· Discuss which curricular and co-curricular activities most contributed to your ethical and spiritual awareness and development.

 

· Examine how attending a worship service outside of your own faith or reading the sacred texts of another religion influenced your ethical and spiritual growth.

 

· Describe your sensibility as a person in terms of your values. Examine how your values have changed in the past year, looking at the ways your education has facilitated or prompted that change.

 

· Examine how your values have been shaped in ways other than those we associate with religion. For example, discuss your political values or your thoughts about human rights and examine how your education has helped to shape those values.  

 

· Discuss the courses you took which contributed most to your efforts to become a more aware, involved, and effective citizen. Identify at least one course that contributed to these efforts and specify how it was meaningful.

 

· Discuss any co-curricular activities that contributed to your efforts to become a more aware, involved, and effective citizen. Identify at least one activity that contributed to these efforts and specify how it was meaningful.

 

· Discuss how you spent your 10 hours of service learning? In what ways were that experience meaningful to you?