Identity, Values and Strengths

Explain a situation where you have had an ethical decision to make. Discuss how you weighed up the values involved in that decision, the decision you made, and the consequences of your action.

I feel fortunate to not have had to face any complex ethical decision in my life so far. So instead of that, I think that one of the very difficul decision that I had to make recently that I could think of was the decision of leaving my previous career and taking up study for a new career path.

I have been thinking about this for years, however due to the fact that I had a stable job and a family to provide for, I always brushed the thought aside. As I have reached essentially a crossroad in my career and my life - whether to continue with my career in Finance or to make the switch now before it's too late - I found myself struggle a lot and could not focus. Thanks to talking to my family and other external influencing factors, I finally made the decision. I told myself that I should be kind (to myself) as well and not just to others, and that I should be fair too and live my own life following what I love, instead of confine myself to a different path that was somewhat forced upon me. I now feel a lot happier, albeit still stressed sometimes about the study curriculum but I keep my eyes on "the prize" and trust the process.

Describe how your culture has influenced your values and identity.

I grew up in a "broken" (for lack of better word) household where my parents went separate ways when I was very young and I was under the care of my grandparents. My grandparents and their generation had to endure some of the toughest times in history and they tend to follow strict rules and customs, so growing up with them, I have been influenced a lot. There are other factors and experiences from my childhood as well but overall I think that all of them have shaped me into the person that I am. I consider myself to be quiet and introverted, and tend to struggle to express myself to someone new or in a group setting (including this exercise). Even though I still don't think to this day that I fullly understand myself and my identity, I learn to accept what I am and try to improve upon my flaws to become a better person everyday. Empathy, kindness and fairness are some of the values I have been predominantly taught growing up, while open-mindedness and being non-judgemental are some of the values that I have picked up along the way.

Evaluate your strengths and limitations in terms of your learning and career development

My personality type according to the 16 personalities model is: INFP-T

My strengths and weakenesses according to this model are:

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

I consider myself to be generous, open-minded, idealistic and passionate (once I find a topic I'm really interested in, such as coding). Therefore, in terms of my learning, I believe that I will always try my best to figure out things on my own and will never back down against problems or challenges; and then once I solve the problem, I will use that experience to help others. I will also be open to hearing new ideas/suggestions from others and if I believe in the ideas, I am happy to make changes to accommodate and progress the ideas/suggestions.

On the other hand, I think that some of my strengths can become my limitations in the way I do things too such as my idealistic mindset as well as other limitations that I have including being unrealistic and very self-critical. I have been trying to balance and improve all of these throughout my life. When something happens or doesn't happen exactly the way I expected it to be, I tend to get emotional and start looking for something/someone to blame (and that something/someone is often me, even if the true cause of it wasn't). This can have a detrimental effect on my learning and my relationships with others. However, throughout the years, I have learned to control this better by either accepting that sometimes things are just the way they are and that as they happened, they cannot be changed anymore so rather than dwelling on the issue, I should rather look on the positive side of things and look for solutions to the problem.

Identify which of your strengths might help you in your learning journey and how they intersect with learning obstacles.

As mentioned above, I think that being open-minded and passionate will help me to persevere and make it to the end of this learning journey. Open-mindedness will allow me to absorb new concepts, ideas to then develop, improve upon and make it my own so that I can overcome obstacles while passion and perseverance will keep me going even when things get tough. I understand that there will be many obstacles that I will face and while some might seem impossible at first, if I keep trying, keep learning and innovating and keep at it, I will be able to find the solutions.

Share an example from your experience of where you were trying to work productively with others, but there was resistance or tension. Discuss the strategies you used at that time, how effective they were, and your reflections on what other strategies you would try now and why.

An example of this would be one time at work when my manager asked another colleague and myself to lead a discussion with the rest of the team without my manager's presence. The discussion was about recent errors made by multiple members of the team that could potentially lead to a risk issue. We were trying to go through the process of identifying how the errors occurred, what were the actions taken and what were the consequences of those actions. However, we faced a lot of resistance from the group and at some point it felt like everyone was trying to shift the blame on something else. Throughout the session, I tried my best to keep it a civil discussion by addressing any and all concerns that any team member had and repeatedly explaining that the goal of the discussion was not to 'name and shame' or anything like that but to understand the thought process and why the mistakes were made so that we could prevent it from happening again in the future. I think that my strategy was quite effective as we were able to obtain feedback and valuable insight from everyone by the end of the discussion even though we faced strong resistance at the beginning.