Personal Development Plan Essay Example for Free

Personal Development Plan Essay Personal Development Planning Made Easy! A guide to recording experience and learning from it What is Personal Development Planning? Studying at university is not just about learning a lot of things that are fascinating in themselves but — at least in the case of most Arts subjects — rather disconnected from ‘the real world’. At the same time as you develop your knowledge of your subject and the skills required to perform well in it, you’re actually developing a whole range of skills and intellectual abilities that can be transferred to other areas of life, including your future employment. Arts subjects don’t generally equip you for a specific job; they actually equip you to undertake almost any job that doesn’t required specialised scientific training. Moreover, university life is intended to present you with all kinds of chances to develop yourself as an individual with a range of interests and experiences, and not just as someone reading books, writing essays and taking exams. An Arts graduate should be versatile, imaginative, critical, flexible, incisive, confident and articulate, and so ready for any challenge or task — if only you can recognise these abilities in yourself. This is where Personal Development Planning (PDP) comes in. With an ever-increasing number of well-qualified graduates entering the labour market each year, it is crucial to your success after completing your studies that you know exactly what skills you have to offer — academic, work-related and personal — when you start applying for jobs, and that you can provide solid evidence of those skills. Your studies will have helped you develop crucial transferable skills and personal atributes, and so will many of your extra-curricular activities; you just have to be able to articulate these to prospective employers. PDP helps you to keep track of what you’ve learned, how you learned it, and what you might do with that learning later on; it can also help you to plan for the future and to identify what skills or attributes you may need to develop in order to achieve your goals. Getting involved with PDP should help you to: †¢Consider what you really want to do †¢Make the right academic, personal and professional decisions †¢Set personal goals and targets †¢Identify programmes and extra-curricular opportunities and training to help you develop your skills †¢Plan ahead to achieve your goals Evaluate your own progress †¢Record different kinds of achievement Personal Development Planning is one part of your university ‘progress file’. This is not an actual document but a combination of any personal development planning activities that you engage in and record, as well as the formal academic transcript of your marks that your university provides you wit h at the end of your studies. It offers a detailed, rounded account of everything that you have achieved at university. In recent years, universities have become more aware that their students need to be highly employable, and that means not just graduating with a good degree but being able to demonstrate a whole range of skills and abilities that will help you to gain and maintain the employment you want. Getting used to setting targets for yourself and evaluating your progress now will stand you in good stead for success in your future working life, and one of the key aims of an Arts education at Bristol is to help you realise that learning is a truly life-long activity, not something that stops when you leave university. We want, therefore, to encourage you to reflect regularly on your performance; we aim to provide useful guidance on how to go about this, for example through this guide, and to provide regular opportunities for reflection and discussion, above all through the personal tutor system. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility for your own personal development, but we’ll do our best to help and support this process. Do I need Personal Development Planning? Try this self-evaluation exercise. For each of the following statements, rate your responses: strongly agree = 0; agree = 1; sort of agree = 2; disagree = 3; strongly disagree = 4. 1. I am certain that I can keep myself motivated towards achieving my degree for the next few years 2. I am very clear what my goals are for the next five years 3. I am confident that I have planned sufficiently to enable me to achieve my goals 4. I am very clear how my degree fits into my life plans 5. I am clear which skills employers are looking for 6.

Use of the Female Gothic in Beloved Essay -- Toni Morrison Beloved Ess

Use of the Female Gothic in Beloved      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is a slave narrative, but it encompasses much more than slavery.   Unlike many slave narratives that focus on the male perception of slavery, Morrison's novel portrays slavery from a feminine point of view.   The main characters are Sethe, her daughter, Denver, and the mysterious Beloved.   In the beginning of the novel, Sethe and her daughter live alone in 124, a house that is haunted by the ghost of Sethe's first daughter. Sethe's two older boys, "Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old. Soon after the sons have fled, Baby Suggs, Denver's grandmother, dies.   The novel centers on Sethe's past, in particular, the death of her first daughter.   This event dominates the book and the action of the novel revolves around this terrible incident.   In Beloved, Toni Morrison utilizes characteristics of the female gothic novel such as mothering, living within enclosed spaces, and the doubli ng of characters, coupled with dilemmas involving memory and repression, to address the issue of slavery.    Beloved illustrates the notion of the gothic mother through the character of Sethe.   Her motherly love is turned into a horrific image of mercy, one that many find difficult to understand. At the time, slaves were valued as property.   They were bred as if they were horses, with their young snatched away from them, often at birth, and no chance of having a family.   Many children were "permanently separated from any other family members, [and] did not know if or when they would ever see their mother[s] again" (King 527).   Sethe describes her own childhood experience with the woman she knew as her mother and it is typical of the experi... ...illions of lives and Morrison gives those lives names and faces.   The narrative form is an effective tool to bring the reality of slavery and all its misery into everyday life.    Works Cited Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. King, Wilma. "Within the Professional Household: Slave Children in the Antebellum South." The Historian 59.3 (1997): 523-540. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin Group, 1987. Samuels, Wilfred and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Ed. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methuen, 1976. Smith, Valerie. "Circling the Subject: History and Narrative in Beloved." Toni Morrison. Henry Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. Ed. New York: Amistad Press, 1993.

Globalization and Its Merits and Demerits

[edit]Proto-globalization Main article:  Proto-globalization The next phase, known as  proto-globalization, was characterized by the rise of maritime European empires, in the 16th and 17th centuries, first the  Portuguese  and  Spanish Empires, and later the  Dutch  and  British Empires. In the 17th century, world trade developed further when  chartered companies  like the  British East India Company  (founded in 1600) and the  Dutch East India Company  (founded in 1602, often described as the first  multinational corporation  in which stock was offered) were established. [39]Animated map showing the development of European  colonial empiresfrom 1492 to present The  Age of Discovery  added the  New World  to the equation,[40]  beginning in the late 15th century. Portugal  and  Castile  sent the first exploratory voyages[41]  around the  Horn of Africa  and to the Americas, reached in 1492 by the Italian explorer  Christopher C olumbus. Global trade growth continued with the  European colonization of the Americas  initiating the  Columbian Exchange,[42]  the exchange of plants, animals, foods, human populations (including  slaves),  communicable diseases, and culture between theEastern  and  Western  hemispheres.New crops  that had come from the Americas via the European seafarers in the 16th century significantly contributed to world population growth. [43]  The Puritans migration to New England, starting in 1630 under John Winthrop with the professed mission of converting both the natives of North America to Puritan Christianity and raising up a â€Å"City Upon a Hill† that would influence the Western European world, is used as an example of globalization. [44]

Persuasive Speech Do Video Games Trigger Off More Violence

Persuasive Speech: Do Video Games Trigger Off More Violence? The more elaborate and violent video games are getting, the more often can you hear an opinion that playing them is detrimental to the teenagers’ mental health and makes them more aggressive in real life. In fact, this suggestion is far-fetched and does not hold water, as there is no evidence to support it. First of all, the majority of surveys that were carried out to clarify this hot issue do not show that video games have adverse effects on our psyche and are more dangerous, than, for instance, films, books or some typical role games that children play outside. Boys have always enjoyed aggressive games like imitating a police pursuit or a war battle, but it doesn’t mean that they do not see the boundaries between the real world and the game world.What is more, according to Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex, England, there is no evident connection between violence statistics figures and the appearance of video games. He claimed that considering soaring sales of video games, the violence figures should also be rocketing, but violence, especially among the young, has decreased. The opponents of the video games might remind us of the campus shootings in the USA, the initiators of which were gamers. However, there is no evidence to suggest that video games were the mai n factor that affected their mental stability and urged them to commit those outrageous crimes. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of young game players are law-abiding citizens. On balance, the allegation that video games are the main factor that causes young people to be aggressive appears to be ungrounded and biased. Mass media’s frequent speculations on this topic distract our attention from the actual causes of violence and let the problem get worse.