Reflection
Learning is a continuous process of observing, acquire, understanding things, even the tiny things that may not keep importance as such, but give you a great deal of learning. I, as all human beings, have been through intense learning process, aiming to develop skills and acquire a perfect skill set of a law student. To attain this perfection, I strive to learn all types of skills that suit my profession at the best. Learning does not always mean to be from the educational perspective, it also holds outside the school. As I chose my profession in law, and got to the edge, I realized those piles of books and paper by the name of the degree does not help you to develop skills that are required in practical life. But practically, one needs to be enough competent and flexible in real life to adopt skills that will help you to move forward in the profession in some way or other. Human beings have the greatest capacity to learn. We learn in every single second of life and employ those learnings in different situations of life, may it be professional or personal life. I also have started from a null set of the human being, and later captured numbers of skills that resulted to be useful in my professional arena. Starting from my powerful and passionate career planning, I seek for the best option through comprehensive analysis and decision making process, ultimately leads to career planning in order to explore possible career paths to develop self-competencies. The career planning does not only include setting up academic path to win more and more professional degrees, but also it entails the other requirement that are necessary for professional war zone. Skills such as effective communication, leadership, convincing power, negotiation, decision making, teamwork, anger and stress management, cognitive and analytical skills are most essential to keep you outshine in the pool of professionals.
Seeing my chaste interest in law, I opted for law field and have started my LLB program. With the dream of being a successful lawyer, I wish to see myself as one of the most promising lawyers of my country. In this regards, I have started to unleash my potential in all aspects to make my dream come true. To be a successful lawyer, one needs to be highly competent with jammed-pack skills sets. I have just joined my LLB program and would like to score good grades in this program. Being a good learner, I promptly adapt to new situations and learn to response, in a way, that is required, not the one I like.
Keeping the importance of interpersonal skills in mind, I worked harder to improve my skills and unleash my hidden talents and proficiencies. Since my school, I found myself to be a good communicator and with good analytical skills. I always used the positive approach to accomplish every work or task. I devotedly know myself, my strengths, my weaknesses and ways to transform weakness into strengths. Undoubtedly, self management is a basic skill I have that helped me throughout my life and will continue to facilitate in the future as well. It includes goal setting, time management, inner satisfaction, motivation, ambitiousness, dealing with stress. Lacking in these skills is the root to every huge problem. I, from the beginning, had a good sense of self management, but nevertheless I had to take certain self management courses to groom myself more like a corporate. With the extreme level of motivation and ambitiousness in myself, I overcome the excitement of procrastination. While working on my procrastination habit, I learnt to manage my time effectively. However, by the time I realized that the stress is a thing that rises above my weaknesses that influence my strengths. Being a poor stress manager, I used to take the stress on my nerve, and this led to affect my other abilities and daily work. I knew the fact that, with a high level of stress, no one can perform successfully. To win my control over stress, I consult to stress management therapist, and under specialist’s consultancy, I learnt to control my stress and perform well under pressure. This transformation helped me to enjoy every aspect of life. Moreover, I believe all these aspects will help me when I will become a professional lawyer.
I started to get involved in different types of entertaining activities more and more, sports, games, volunteering, kid’s activities and many more. There are certain skills that are as important as food to carry a successful life with respect to the profession and personal life. Managing stress is one of them. As I started to control my stress, I unleashed my other hidden abilities such as anger management, smart decision making, and effective persuading skills. Thus, being involved in sports has helped me in improving my personality and this will benefit me when I will become a professional lawyer. There are several other skills that I have developed and learnt from my university and my education career and by participating in different events, I believe I am a good debater, a good motivator and a good mooter.
With outstanding leadership qualities, I was acknowledged as the President of student Union in School where I held responsible and accountable directly in all the aspects. This created a sense of responsibility in me which helped me out in different aspects of life apart from my profession. Being a student of law, I had to be familiar with socializing and tackling the work situations and people from ethnically diverse groups. As I believe these aspects are critical for a successful lawyer. Just then, I comprehended that the degree is just a hopeless piece of paper unless you acquire the command over interpersonal skills that just count a great deal.
Communication has always been the strength in every aspect of a person. Communication is my strength and communication skill has certainly helped me in my life. However, simply speaking out your thoughts and ideas do not merely mean to communicate, effective communication entails negotiating, listening and convincing others upon what you say and think. I apply my communication skills in numerous activities like debate competition, public speaking, marketing of events, convincing people to attend seminars, etc. By participating in various debate competitions in university, I address serious issues at European and global levels. These experiences have helped me in building my confidence and can be critical when I practice law at the professional level. By communicating effectively, I have learnt to listen others and respond them thoughtfully. With the improved negotiation skills and power to convince people to my point, this ability also assists me to think rationally according to the sensitivity and openness of the situation. I have utterly learnt to assess the sensitivity of critical situations and respond people, in a way, that does not displease them. A fine combination of both academics and extracurricular activities benefited me by providing expertise in certain areas. With the learned experiences and expertise in major areas through my academic and extracurricular activities, I have organized several international events. These international events are International Arts Events in UK, Charity days and monthly community events of different companies, Theater events at international level, Global workshops, seminars, and events, etc.
My participative nature leaned me to involve in volunteering activities. As an active member of the Team for Japan Earthquake 2012, South Asia Earthquake 2008, International Disaster Committee, I unleashed my hidden potentials effectively to work with diverse teams that take in people from various cultures. While working with teams, I spruce my collaborative learning as well as provided me the path to assess the situation and apply my creative ideas and knowledge to a variety of critical situations. This helped me to improve my decision making power and critical thinking which helped me enormously in my career path and in becoming a professional and successful lawyer.
RELATING WITH THEORIES OF LEARNING:
The theories that relate to learning through experiences are the best match with my learning process and the way I adopt different skills. Sensory Stimulation Theory says that learning takes place when multi-senses are stimulated. Sense such as seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting are the great source of learning out of which sense of sight helps 75% of people to learn quickly. As I experienced, I learnt a lot through sense of sight and observing. I learnt different cultures, people perspectives, and diversity in organizations by observing things, which directly relates to the sensory stimulation theory.
Reinforcement theory is the most common theory that I can easily relate with my learning journey. The theory says people are leaning to repeat the behavior more if it has reflected the positive consequences. Also, positive rewards or reinforcements can highly influence the behavior. In this regards, I always tended to work more when I was given any verbal or tangible rewards.
Facilitation theory also signifies that learning is productive and fast if educator acts as a facilitator, one who provides a comfortable atmosphere and friendly approach to learn or work. I personally believe that I have learnt the most in such environment with the greater remembrance ability. This is the reason people are moving towards to learn through seminars, consultancies, etc. Hence, these theories rectify that theories in some way or other fit our learning process and experience throughout the life.
ACADEMIC PROFILE AND EXPERIENCES:
While planning my career, I explore several possible paths that can best go with my competencies. I saw the sights of my nature as a non-scientific person who terribly dislikes science subjects. I further explored that I had sound competencies over leading teams, management activities, supervising projects along with socializing, negotiating skills. These skills gave me a direction to opt for undergoing law studies (LLB) so that I should practically relate my abilities at my work. During the course of LLB, I undertook several internship and corporate training programs, which helped me to learn practically more than theoretically. In internship programs, I held directly responsible to learn about law practices and perform daily and routine based tasks that professional lawyers undergo. With the exposure of the corporate arena, I learnt to deal with critical situations with my problem solving approach. Throughout my academic span, my other courses have helped me to improve my proficiencies more. moreover, to be a professional and successful lawyer, I need to score good grades in my LLB program. I am aiming to score around 2.1 in my LLB program. Finally, this academic as well as corporate at the law firm have helped me to define my career path more richly. I decided to continue my studies in law and aimed to see myself as a successful lawyer of my country. After my education, I aim to start my professional job at an organization where senior lawyers can help and guide me to learn the art and science of law. With the completion of my LLB program, I would switch to more appropriate employment opportunity or even practice me own professional or may be open my own law consultancy firm. I have also worked at another corporation where I dealt with multifaceted situations and different cases that the firm had to face. Some of the major tasks that I performed include learning how to do counseling and greet the customers, manage urgent meeting calls, immediate implementation of procedures, scheduling travelling, etc. However, I successfully surpassed every challenging situation that has made me and my organization feel proud.
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES:
MY PLAN AND STRATEGY TO DEVELOP SKILLS:
Though I have a proper skill set that a lawyer requires, but still I lack behind in many of expertise to acquire that position and to excel in the position successfully. In order to stand at desired position, I will have to overcome my weakness that I listed above. These weaknesses merely do not depend on the degree; rather one needs to get involve into self study. I have planned to teach myself the understandings of technology by appearing in different short term seminars and training programs relating to global technology and meeting advancements and how it influence the role of a lawyer. I heartedly realize that awareness about technology and advancement is the most important tool to win the war in professional pool.
Sometimes, I am unable to identify problems at the initial stage, which result to emerge as a huge problem in the later months. However, I am good at proposing relevant solutions and working out immediately to solve problems, but identifying problems at very initial stage, before it come up as a bang, can protect me and my organization to spend useless energy, time and efficiency at work. I have planned to facilitate myself with the professional skills training program. These training programs help individuals to use cause analysis techniques, which shows the way to identify the problems systematically by continuously monitoring operations.
Overall, by using my academic knowledge I gained in law studies, and taking part in additional activities like sports, event organizing, leadership activities, and debate competitions, I have successfully improved my leadership as well as communication skills to a greater scope and will further improve my deficiencies. Thus, this will help me to become a professional lawyer.
