Critically Reflecting on Your Experience

The following will guide you through critically reflecting on your WIL experience through a series of activities. These activities and the provided prompts to support you to engage with each activity are meant to gradually get you to dig deeper at each stage, from surface level take-ways and impressions to in-depth reflections on how this experience shapes your future career goals and next steps.

Capture Your Experience

Activity Time Estimate: Approx. 15-30 minutes

Let’s start with an overview of WIL experience and your initial thoughts and feelings about it, highlighting key aspects of your work.

Reflect

Note: This activity is for your own learning and reflection only; these responses will not be reviewed or marked.

Tip: Practicing on providing an overview of an experience can be very handy when writing cover letters and answering questions in an interview.

Creating links between your experience and your degree

Narrowing our scope a little further, you will focus now on the links between the different elements of your experiences and how they all connect, from how you are applying your learning in this experience to how people and workflows contributed to your experience.

Activity

Create a mind map illustrating the connections between personal, interpersonal, and processes, and environmental elements of your WIL experience. These connections need only to be annotated in short form writing; complete sentences are not required. See example of a mind map below. When creating your mind map, please address the following categories using the prompts as guidelines:

Personal

How did this experience engage with your learnings from your class and degree; how did it engage with your values and interests? Additional prompts to consider when addressing this prompt:

  • What skills and knowledge were you able to apply in your experience?
  • How did the experience align with your own work-related values?
  • What parts of the work experience did you find engaging, and which parts of the work you didn’t?

Interpersonal

How did your colleagues shape your experience and contribute to the development of your competencies (skills and knowledge)?

  • How were you able to consider and integrate other peoples’ perspectives?
  • How were your values and interests shaped by your interactions with your colleagues (if applicable)?
  • Did you attempt to find a mentor? If you were able to find a mentor in your placement, how did they affect your learning and future competency development?
  • What did you value the most from interactions with your colleagues?

Processes

What processes or workflows were crucial to your role, and how did you respond to these workflows?

  • Did you identify any biases or assumptions you had before going into the workplace?
  • What processes did you really enjoy, and why? Which ones did you find challenging and needed time to adjust to?

Environmental

How did the physical or organizational setting affect your experience?

Example

The following is a sample of a mind map below uses the free version of Miro. To create a mindmap using Miro, follow these steps:

  1. Create Miro account (it’s free) and sign in
  2. Create a “new board”
  3. Select one of the Mindmap templates you are presented with
  4. Happy mapping!

Please note that the University of Waterloo is not affiliated with Miro. If you want to learn more about the software’s privacy policy in deciding whether to use it, please read Miro's Privacy policy.

Image Description © University of Waterloo

Note: This is only one way to complete this activity. You are welcome to use any software you like or complete the activity on a piece of paper.

Tip: Identifying the different elements of as workplace and how they connect can support you in articulating career stories in interviews or in cover letters. Moreover, reflecting on workflows and processes can support reflection on what works for you.

Examining the experience more closely

Activity Time Estimate: Approx. 15-30 minutes

Let’s look more closely at the moving parts of your experience, diving deeper into the connections you were making in the above mindmap activity. You will be examining 4 areas related to career development: values and needs, contributions (or impacts), interests, and competencies development. Examining your experience through these four areas will support you with identifying and articulating your successes and contributions, along with your competencies and how you enjoy applying them. It may also help to enlighten some aspects of why the experience may have unfolded as it did.

Reflect

Note: This activity is for your own learning and reflection only; these responses will not be reviewed or marked.

Competencies Development

To do this activity, you will be using the Future Ready Talent Framework (FRTF). Please do the following using the FRTF Competency Chart (PDF):

  1. Identify 3-4 competencies you developed during your degree and WIL experiences under the “Skills, Abilities, and Knowledge” column
  2. Indicate when/where in the experience you used these competencies and how they contributed to the task in which you used those competencies.

Tip: Examining your contributions and actions in an experience to identify evidence is excellent for a cover letter, which requires you to include evidence to support your claims you make. Evidence is often omitted from cover letters or in interview answers.