Amna Chaudhary
Personal Identity
My personal history plays a huge impact on me because it has made me who I am today. My life in the past has had many ups and downs with the biggest one immigrating to Canada which provided me with the freedom and independence I would not have been able to have due to lack of security in my native country. In my middle school, I adapted myself to the world of multiculturalism and diversity which was a new phenomenon to me as I was never exposed to so many ethnicities at once which gave me strength and taught me how to respect others. Continuing to high school while I was entering my early teen years was a critical time but with the support of my guidance counsellor and teachers behind my back to ensure I was focused on the right path towards excellence in academics. I pursued to York University was when my family decided to move to Mississauga and I transfer myself to University of Toronto Mississauga campus as it was closer to home then but little did I know what was about to come. I was entering my second year at UTM where I did not know anyone and had to start from scratch to make new friends, to get comfortable with the campus and basically starting my life all over again. This time it was not easy as everyone had their own clusters and I was already overwhelmed with the course material and the new town, Mississauga. I was not succeeding at UTM hence, transferred myself to Sheridan College where I was able to succeed and build self confidence again. I could have faith in myself again that I can succeed and accomplish the degree I wished to pursue.
My journey at Sheridan has been nothing but a pleasant one where I have had no trouble with enrolling in courses or making new friends. In fact, in every class I met new people and made new friends who always have encouraged and helped me whenever needed. At Sheridan, everyone has been supportive and has always encouraged to pursue and complete the degree. The journey at Sheridan has influenced me to continue being positive as there is always another way of success. My development goals from the first CLP to now have completely changed. In the first year, my goals were to improve communication skills, curiosity and imagination skills, and critical thinking and problem solving skills.
Now, my get ugly focus has been collaboration and leadership skills. I would like to say that since my first CLP course I have work on the competencies I had set goals for and now I am focusing a brand new one to get ugly with to only get comfortable with it in the end. Working on the three skills from my first CLP has definitely helped me shape into a much confident person and with the assistance of creative courses, I am able to imagine freely and speak without any hesitation. The evidence of such is the following assignment from my recent Creativity class where I was forced to experience nature and talk about it as my class assignment. To my surprise, I was able to write about my experience more freely and was able to communicate in a manner which was enjoyable. This exercise helped me improve my communication, curiosity and imagination skills and even gave me time to reflect and solve problems. Next problem I have gotten ugly with is collaboration and leadership following which I would like to work on initiative and entrepreneurship in a more niche manner.
After further analysis, my revised Why statement has concluded to be that “I stand for myself in order to achieve my goals and be successful and be happy within.” This is my why statement because in the past due to my personality and MBTI resulting in feeling, I had a very accepting and compassionate nature due to which many times I felt like I forced into making some decisions which I otherwise would not have made. After learning from several such incidents, I was able to learn and stand for myself to only achieve my set goals and be content with myself. I do realize that my Why statement is simple but with past incidents, this is what I need. I need to set goals just for myself and achieve them so I can be proud of myself and be content for myself and I really have to stand for myself as no one else will.
were personal growth, achievement, human rights, truth, commitment, safety, innovation, creativity, and stability. Reflecting back at them, I would still like to say that personal growth and achievement still remain my top two because of how important it is to me and assists me in constantly growing as a bigger, successful, and a positive person. My third value will be now commitment because as I have aged, commitment is very important to me in personal, professional, and school environment. It provides stability which is required for achievement and personal growth which leads to my fourth value being stability. The fifth value I will now focus is safety because nowadays you need security and safety for everything to be able to be free and not worry about what others will say or think leading to sixth and seventh value being creativity and innovation as they hand in hand. You can only be creative when you feel safe and innovation only occurs when there is creativity present and also truth because you cannot be creative and innovate based on lies which is why being truthful is necessary. Lastly, to conclude all my values is the umbrella which covers them all is human rights providing with legal rights to be treated equally and fairly. My values have changed due to the impact of life events which have taken in past years after CLP 1. I feel more content with this order of my values as I can abide by them more truthfully.
Another self assessment I did in advanced CLP is the Grit test where my score was 3.50 which measures how well I can handle long term goals and not demotivated by failures and set backs. Couple of years ago, I probably would not have achieved this much of a high score but I was only able to do after coming to Sheridan and starting my education all over again. In CLP 1 , I met myself on a sheet of paper which helped me understand myself and I became aware of my strong skill set and weaknesses and where I had room to improve. Despite have failures now, I decide not to give but to keep trying harder and harder till the goal is achieved. Before I would feel low for not being able to successful but now I just get up and try again and I have started to love this about myself because once I decide not to give up, I have this streak of passion ignite within me which is ready to fire it all up.
Another test I did is The Big Five Personality Test which had a result similar to those of MBTI result but some were different where I had become a little of introvert compared to 2 years ago, where I was assessed as an extrovert. I am still fairly open to new experiences and still have the agreeable tendency present within me. I am more nervous now which I can say is due to the current work arrangement where I have two jobs and school to tackle which can be very stressful at times.
The information from both the tests makes me realize that I have grown from who I used to be two years ago. My focus for goal is different (collaboration and leadership), my 9 values have rearranged in a different order, and my results from Grit score are not what it would have been before. I have grown to be more of a resilient person and grown to less agreeable of others and focus on what just agrees with me. Therefore, the realization of how I have grown is quite astonishing because I would have never been able to realize this is on my own. From here on, I am confident that I will continue to grow with only one goal in mind to graduate from Sheridan College from where I will be focusing on different set of skills to further improvise.
