Introducing the reflective section of your project report

At the conclusion of your final year project you will be asked to submit a report. As part of this module you will be required to write a two page reflection which will account for 5% of your grade. This reflective section will be in two parts:

Part one: a one page reflection on your project and its performance over the course of the project. This is an opportunity to reflect on the original project brief and evaluate your project, considering how successful it has been, if and how the brief changed over the course of the project, what went well, what you could improve and how you adapted your approach as you progressed towards your project goals.

Part two: a one page reflection on the professional skills you used during your project and which of those seem the most valuable to you. In particular, you should consider whether any of the skills, knowledge or insight gained from your experiences on the project could be broadly transferred into the workplace or further study. Do you think you would like to use and improve these skills in a professional context and, if so, in what context would that be? Of course, you might also reflect that you would like to avoid having to use these skills in the future.

Why are you being asked to reflect?

Your degree has provided a number of strong and transferable skills which are very much in demand from a range of employers across a range of careers both in and outside of the lab and workshop. These skills also provide a solid foundation to any post graduate studies. Keeping a good record of your reflections will help to prepare you for future applications as employers will often use situational based questions and will want to know how you have learnt from your experiences.

To make the most of your degree you will need not only to be able to identify the skills you gained but also understand, and be able to discuss, the actual experiences when you developed and used them. Listing skills without having the actual experiences to illustrate their use is of no value in an interview. It is also important to elaborate how you employed the skill and why it was important to do it that way. Understanding and being able to articulate your strengths and the professional skills you have gained, particularly in this final project, will give you the confidence in your abilities to transition into new environments and be ready to take on new challenges.

Reflecting on experiences and then being able to identify the long term learning and value from them is also the basis of most professional learning, both formal and informal. Skills in reflective learning will help you move to your first career destination but will also provide the tools to manage your career over your entire working life. Understanding the skills you have gained here and your learnings in developing them should also give you confidence in using them in the workplace.

Professional skills reflection

Professional skills are those which you will be using in this project which often transfer into the workplace, or further study. A number of employers who are working with the Science faculty at York have informed the University that they can see some skills gaps in the workplace in early graduate recruits. These skills gaps relate to problem solving, communication and responsibility and it may be useful for you to reflect on your development of these skills and consider how you apply them in different situations (see the journal prompt questions below for further insight into these). The nine York Strengths provide a good overview of the skills and characteristics employers are looking for generally. You may consider that you have gained others that you feel will be valuable to you later.

Reflecting on your professional skills development

There will be a range of skills, insights and strengths you recognise when reflecting on your project. A range of employers have indicated to the University that the three professional skills below are of particular importance to them and this is why we ask you to reflect on one or more of these as part of your report. If you opt to use other skills, strengths or insights gained from the project you should ask yourself similar questions to the prompts below: what happened, how did I react and what implications does this have for my future responses to similar situations?

Problem solving

Did your experiences include the definition of a problem in your project where you didn’t have an obvious problem to solve, or even a full understanding of all the issues involved? How did you overcome this to agree the problem statement?
How did you come up with workable approaches? How did you and others feel about your approach? If, in the future, you had to solve a similar problem for a client what implications would your experiences have?
How did you know when to stop? Was there a prototype, or early preparatory or exploratory work, followed by a more comprehensive solution? Could there be still more work to do later, given time?

Communication

How effective do you feel your communications were across different mediums, e.g. email, Slack, face-to-face or online meetings? Did you perceive that some styles worked better in different contexts, for example between your peers or with your supervisor? How did you maintain professionalism across these different mediums?
How did you communicate and collaborate virtually over the course of your project? How did you make sure key points were clear? How did you ensure you were clear on actions from the communication?
What interactions did you find difficult? Why do you think that was? How did you manage these?
Did you get feedback from others when progressing your project? How did you feel about this feedback and did you adapt your project or processes in light of it?
How did you take on other people’s expectations and viewpoints in this project? How did you feel about these different viewpoints? Did you adapt your communication in light of them?

Responsibility

To what extent do you think you took ownership for workload and problem solving in the project? How did you know this?
What complexities did you face and what were surprising to you? How did you react to setbacks, emotionally and practically?
Were there any areas where you felt that you had to ‘go the extra mile’ to get your project over the line?

For further guidance on reflective writing see the ‘Guide to reflective writing’ document provided.