Exit Essay

Birth is such a miracle, but rebirth in my opinion is much more of a miracle; as change could be eerie due to the transitioning to a whole new thing. In life we go through major changes that shape us to be who we are today, but not necessarily losing oneself. Like caterpillars evolving to a butterfly, no matter how frightening change can be they evolve to something so pulchritudinous, but remain the same caterpillar. This metaphor is truly an example of the important lesson I learned as a student at CSUMB. As I transition to being a graduate, I always kept myself true to myself and my ambition. This lesson is extremely important to me as it has helped me to focus on what was really important to me and reminded me the reason for pursuing a degree in psychology. Recognizing that I am sovereign, and a unique individual provided me to own myself in spirit, mind and body; becoming the owner of my life and destiny and taking full responsibility for them. Coming to a self realization of being the owner of my life guided me to making decisions, re orienting and re creating my existence around the principle of personal sovereignty throughout my college career.
Mastering personal sovereignty helped me gain skills as a result of majoring in psychology that makes me adequate for going on forward and pursuing a career in counseling. For example, I gained the skills of being genuinely warm towards others, patient and understanding by working in multiple group projects in which my skills were very beneficial as we excelled on our concepts. Mastering these specific skills would be essential to empower the client; as being a competent counselor requires a relationship with the client based on trust. In addition, I have also gained communication skills based on the plethora of class discussions and presentations, which consist of active listening and eloquently conveying my facts and opinions to my peers. This particular skill would be fundamental as a counselor since it consist a lot of active listening towards clients and also being able to communicate with them while summarizing everything together accurately and concisely to convey a solution in just a few words. Furthermore, being able to enroll in a variety of classes at CSUMB has enabled me to enhance my logic critically and being able to organize my goal. As a result of these skills I was able to challenge, reassure and motivate myself to resist any difficulties I may have; which would be great assets to portray to clients. Lastly, having had life experiences made me develop the skill of relatability. This is an extremely important skill I developed as it enabled me with the ability of being approachable to analyze, interpret and judge situations accurately.
As a psychology major my skills I have gained throughout this journey would not have been met if it wasn’t in correlation to the five major learning outcomes in my major. My skills are cohesive to the five major learning outcomes for psychology in the way that I was able to apply psychology concepts in familiarizing myself with major theoretical perspectives through life experiences and comparing it to that of child development; in which I was able to assimilate a concept and theory fulfilling MLO 1. Enhancing my critical thinking skill and developing understanding and warmth towards others, I was able to think creative and convey my opinions using reasoning in arguments and persuasion when approaching problems with the out most sophistication and respect. Granted this specific skill, I achieved MLO 3. Correspondingly to my active skill of organization, I was able to synthesize an abundant of research and methods in which I was able to design and conduct basic studies and generalize research conclusions appropriately. Provided that, I was able to manage MLO 2. Additionally, with all my skills gained I was able to apply my knowledge and input it to my daily life as training to understand psychological principles to personal, social and organizational issues; in hope that I can articulate the importance it is towards social understanding and public policy and recognizing the ethical complexities of applying psychology. With this in mind, reflecting other values underpinning psychology such as the need for ethical behavior, tolerance of ambiguity, demonstration of skepticism and intellectual curiosity, civic responsibility and most important respect for human diversity; it adhered me with the influential value that psychology has in fulfilling a better world. With these intentions I was able to consummate MLO 4 and 5.
In light of my many skills, my professional goal at this moment is to pursue a nonprofit organization named City Year to enhance more my experience in working with children and adolescents starting January of next year. City year’s initiative is the success of the adolescents and committing to harnessing one of the most powerful forces for positive change through leadership and service. I strongly believe this will benefit me towards my career path to being a counselor as I will be working directly with adolescents using what I learned to portray positive change for them. This particular professional goal was established by me since my sophomore year at CSUMB and hasn’t changed, due to having a plan of building my resume with more experience and saving money to go on with achieving my master’s in counseling after.
For the purpose of my career, I have exceedingly acquired admirable skills by attending CSUMB and majoring in psychology that has indeed prepared me to pursue my lifelong professional goal. Given these points I was able to achieve them specifically at CSUMB as I was able to make my college experience a learning one as each day spent here was a day of discovery. Overall, graduating this semester not only gave me a career goal but a personal one by looking back and reminiscing on my accomplishments I have made here at CSUMB. In looking back, CSUMB has truly been influential professionally and personally in the way that it got me to explore a new location, independence, self actualization and the meaning of change. In essence, my personal goal is from the wise words of Mahatma Gandhi “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”