Have you checked in on your reflections lately?

Cover image by: fahmionline and Gan Khoon Lay from the Noun Project

Transcript:
My name is Nathan Wilson, Assistant Director with the Duke University Career Center. You’re listening to the Career Center podcast.

The verdict is in! Duke students are vampires. How are they vampires? Well for one, they stay up all night doing what it is they do. I assume that's always studying. 2016 National Geographic article reports that historically vampires have been a scapegoat for disease and they did shut down K-ville last year because of the flu epidemic so there’s a little bit of truth to that. The big one is… that Duke students are vampires because they have no reflection. It's been said many times that Duke students are exceptional at task completion but not necessarily experts on strategy. This makes sense. To get into Duke you had to do a lot. The high school business model essentially was to overload on activities and organizations; everything you can possibly do. It's just saturation. Arguably, it was quantity over quality. The thing is that when you're that busy do you have time, or even know how to reflect on the experiences you are engaging in? As you make the transition from high school into college and as college goes on the importance of reflection is going to become apparent because decisions are going to be more important and a lot more in your hands. When you are in grade school, a lot of things are kind of just assigned to you or prescribed to you. I mean that you have some freedom to get involved with what you want to get involved with but you may not have a car, you may not have… There may be all kinds of hurdles and barriers from you being able to just completely get involved in what you want to get involved with. So what does it mean to reflect? I think they're kind of two different ways that you can explain this based on the way your mind works you know and so I can talk through the sort of two ways that I look at reflection when you're really trying to figure out what the heck that means.
If you're more of a humanities person or more of a creative type not so much the of the scientific orientation you can think of reflection as something that’s more about philosophizing. Or in more of a philosophical sense so “who am I and who do I want to become? What do I want to get out of life? What's my purpose? What’s my relationship to my community and to others around me?” Those are hard questions to ask and questions to answer of yourself. I think a lot of that comes back to values because that's the scary thing. Like “who am I?” That's a loaded question. If you use values, it gives you a concrete means to evaluate your own life and the decisions you make and what you're doing.

Forbes.com had an article a few years back that talked about the importance of reflection for college students. One of the big things they talked about was that this is a time really to explore and to learn about yourself and moreover to discover yourself. You can't really do that unless you're taking time to think about what it is you're doing and being intentional about the decisions you make. A lot of undergraduates, as this article says, have`an instrumentalist view of college. That it's completely a means to prepare for a career and there is some truth to that but your career fits into your life and not the other way around for most people. So career should coincide with the big life goals that you have. These may include starting a family or traveling or I mean if could be any number of things… you know… giving back to your community. Maybe you want to start a nonprofit but that's not going to be your means for income right off the bat. There are any number of things you could be doing but you have to think about what it is that will give you the most satisfaction in life.
There were a couple programs that this article mentions. One of them was the Stanford Reflec