Self-Reflection
Between Wesleyan’s open curriculum, your major, campus jobs, research, and everything you do outside of the classroom, you’re making a lot of choices about how to spend your time here. Self-reflection is how you make sense of those choices and use them to decide what comes next.
You don’t need to know what you want. What helps is looking honestly at what you’ve done and connecting the dots: what you valued about it, what you were good at, what you’d want more of, what you want to learn next, and what the work you’re considering asks for and rewards. Those answers shift as you go, and they keep shifting after graduation, which is why alumni have lifetime access to career advising.
Reflection is behind most of the concrete decisions you’ll make. Which internship to take, what to write a thesis about, whether graduate school is worth it, which job to say yes to.
Below are the programs, appointments, and tools that can help, from the most structured to the ones you can start today.
Ideals into Practice (CSPL 405)
Ideals into Practice is a quarter-credit course, listed on WesMaps as CSPL 405, that runs on your own schedule and centers on a digital portfolio.
The portfolio is organized around six competencies: collaboration, communication, creativity, digital literacy, inquiry and analysis, and socio-cultural awareness. For each one, you find evidence in what you’re already doing: your campus job, your coursework, your activities outside class.
If you work on campus, your supervisor takes part as well, so your job counts as coursework and you get their read on what you’re doing well. Supervisors have their own guide to the program if yours wants to know more.
You end up with a documented account of your experience and your thinking about it, ready for applications of any kind.
Because it carries credit and sets its own pace, it fits at any point, whether you’re a sophomore deciding what to pursue or a senior making sense of four years that didn’t follow a plan.
Getting started: Registration, a getting started guide, and the course timeline are on the program site.
Career Decisions is the GCC’s online course, free to Wesleyan students and alumni. Sharon Belden Castonguay, our Executive Director, teaches it, drawing on her training as an adult developmental psychologist and on research from psychology, organizational behavior, and sociology.
Four modules, about thirteen hours of material, at your own pace. The first looks at why people rule out options too early, usually from choice paralysis or assumptions about a given career. The second examines how cultural expectations and the people close to you shape what you think you want. The third takes on the passion-versus-marketable-skills question and has you map the skills you have against the ones you’d need. The fourth uses design thinking to widen the range of work you’re considering, then has you make a case for the impact you want to have.
The exercises are the substance: a life-history interview, a skills map, a mind map of what you spend your time on, and a capstone that pulls it together.
With no credit and no deadlines, it works as a lighter alternative to Ideals into Practice or as something to do alongside it.
Getting started: Access for Wesleyan students and alumni, or the full syllabus on Coursera.
Career Decisions: From Insight to Impact
Talk It Through with a Career Advisor
A career advising appointment is reflection with another person in the room, which for a lot of people is easier than doing it alone. An advisor will ask you questions you would not think to ask yourself, notice patterns across experiences you had filed as unrelated, and press on the places where what you say you want doesn’t match what you’ve enjoyed doing.
Peer Career Advisors also offer one-on-one appointments and are a good first stop if you’d rather start with a student. Career Advising explains how appointments work and what to expect.
Reflect on Work You Are Already Doing
Much of what you’ll want to reflect on is work you’re already doing. Writing it down as it happens is easier than reconstructing it two years later.
Your campus job. Campus work involves responsibility, judgment, and people depending on you, which is much of what entry-level employers screen for. The Campus Job Worklog is a place to record projects, events, and problems you handled while the details are fresh, so they’re there when you need them for an application, a recommendation request, or an interview. Ideals into Practice builds this in more formally, with your supervisor involved.
An internship for credit. The Internship for Credit Course builds reflection into the experience itself, so a summer of work becomes something you’ve examined and can speak to.
Research, a thesis, or study abroad. Describing this work outside your department means talking about skills instead of using the vocabulary of the discipline, which matters for jobs and for graduate applications alike. Worth asking too why you chose the question you did, since what drew you to a subject is usually a clue. An advisor can help with both.
On Your Own
Three places to start on your own, in order of how much time they take.
Reflection questions. A written list of prompts is a straightforward place to begin. You don’t need to work through all of them. Pick five that make you uncomfortable and write real answers, not mental ones.
Designing Your Career is a free online tool from Yale’s Office of Career Strategy, built on the design-thinking approach developed at Stanford. It’s structured, it takes a few hours, and it is a reasonable substitute if you want something guided without signing up for anything.
Google Career Dreamer is a lighter, more exploratory tool that uses AI to surface career possibilities based on what you tell it about yourself. Treat it as a way to generate options worth investigating rather than as an answer. Our AI Career Toolkit covers where these tools help and where they don’t.
Learn From Alumni
Hearing how someone else made sense of a path that looked unclear at the time can shift how you think about your own.
A thirty-minute conversation with an alum five years out of a major like yours will tell you what their work involves, what surprised them, and whether it turned out to matter the way they expected. The Networking page covers how to find and reach Wesleyan alumni, and WesLink makes the introduction for you.
To start by listening instead, the GCC produces two podcasts, both hosted by Sharon Belden Castonguay. First Year Out follows the college-to-work transition through recent graduates, with episodes on succeeding in a first job, managing stress, and handling money. Listen on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts. Careers by Design: The Interviews covers the paths of well-known Wesleyan alumni, on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.
Not Sure Where to Start?
If you’re unsure which of these fits, book an appointment and an advisor will help you choose. That conversation is often faster than working it out alone.
