This week’s reflective journal entry…

This week we’ve been asked to reflect on how submitting our first assignment for the ATP made us feel.

My key concern was making sure that I had all the elements, uploaded to the right place and that the submission went through without any obstacles. Because I was going to be away when the assignment was due, I needed to submit it early and I was a little anxious that I was missing a crucial element that I wouldn’t be able to fix while I was away.

However, it looks like the submission went smoothly and I’ve effectively put Assignment 1 to the back of my mind (it is only worth 20% of marks anyway) and I’m moving on to think about the next assessment, which looks like it will require me to do a little more writing and critical thinking.

Interestingly, my students (who I met for the first time this week), will be preparing for a similarly weighted assignment in the next few weeks. Several of them are already clearly quite concerned about it and if my experience with the ATP assessments so far can teach me anything, it’s to reassure them that it is a developmental assignment – it’s designed to help them start to pin down and reflect critically on their dissertation topics. And it is only worth 20% of the final mark!

Image via regan76 on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.