Vision

Carve out a large block of time or many short segments of time over multiple days to reflect on your vision of the future. Use your description of your motivations during orientation and your completed Articulating Your Purpose activity as a starting point. Create a narrative that provides an inspiring description of your future career vision as a psychology practitioner-scholar. Use these questions to help guide your reflection:

• What impact do you want to make in the field of psychology?
• What are your passions and areas of interest within psychology?
• What might you like to learn more about through research and scholarship in the field?
• What would your practice of psychology look like?
• How does your master's in psychology fit into your overall career vision?
• Do you know any psychology professionals in your desired career you would like to emulate?
• Imagine you have already achieved your future career vision. What did you accomplish?

Refer to the unit readings to tie your vision and goals into the role of a practitioner-scholar, including your ideas about what it will mean to you to be a practitioner-scholar. Also, consider searching the Career Center, Capella Library, or the Internet for additional reflective exercises or inspiring ideas about creating a future career vision to help you brainstorm.

Goals

Once you create your vision as a psychology practitioner-scholar, it is time to translate that vision into specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely long-term goals to create milestones for a plan of action. Review your narrative and formulate personally meaningful and relevant educational, career, and life goals to achieve your vision. Here are a couple of examples to get you started:

• Earn my master's degree in psychology in three years.
• Develop strategies to stay up to date and evaluate scholarly and professional literature and research related to key theories, authors, and best practices in technology-enhanced K-12 learning over the next three years.
• Accurately select, administer, score, and interpret psychological tests in the workplace in four years.

Consider reviewing the SMART Goals Presentation and searching the Capella Library or the Internet for additional reflective exercises or inspiring ideas about transforming your vision into actionable long-term goals.