Topic: Career Development/Life Plan

Graduate programs are organized to help provide the student with a well-rounded, balanced curriculum of interrelated courses. These courses are to help stimulate and facilitate learning on a higher-level for graduate students, but sometimes the higher-level or order of thinking is not fully utilized to its fullest extent. In many instances, students are asked to recall, comprehend, and apply given concepts, issues, and theories – instead of analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating their importance or relevance to one’s future career aspirations. Thus, one’s countless hours of studies to obtain a graduate degree may mean just that – a graduate degree in a physical sense, not a practice one.

After completing your graduate coursework, how can you use your coursework in your current and future career plans? Have you been able to incorporate and utilize the various elements of learning (concepts, theories, issues, discussions) into your current work situation? Please provide a detailed discussion of this potential application process of your graduate coursework. Specifically, do you think that you will be able to carry over the knowledge gained in your graduate coursework into your future career plans? Were there specific courses that you considered more important than others in terms of your personal and professional development? Were there courses that you helped you to achieve more personal and professional enrichment? As noted before, please be as detailed as possible in your answering and justification of your responses. Finally, upon successful completion of this master’s comprehensive examination, you will become a new graduate of APUS. As a future APUS graduate, you may have recommendations and/or suggestions for your given program of study – so this is an opportunity to illustrate such recommendations and/or suggestions in terms of offering these thoughts in a precise and analytical manner. From the perspective of your given discipline, should there be any changes or modifications to strengthen the course offerings in your program of study?