Week 5 – Reflection

This week, I spent most of my time learning how to deal with Shaders and figuring out how to import correctly 3D assets on Unity for my prototype. I also reviewed the Scrum framework and had my first off business attempt to use SMART goals, and the most important: I got utterly astonished by the nature of the reflection topic. This last topic took me out of my comfort zone and made me realize how much I could be done better over my academic life. 

I’ve been using the Scrum framework as part of my work life since 2010. At that time, I started working in a Software House with Java and had little experience with that technology. I had so much going on in my personal life, and I used the work as a escape from my problems; thus, I just jump into a pilot project to adopt agile methodologies. From that time until nowadays, I use religiously the main ceremonies, principally the Sprint Retrospective (Retro). 

In those sessions, we usually keep the focus on our goals and how to improve. It’s a joyous moment where we (as a team) share our concerns, aspirations, and frustrations. And it helps to improve the overall quality of work of all teams that I participated in before. I usually follow the definition (What is a Sprint Retrospective?, no date) and consider that I have a relative success level. 

But this is all about my work-life and not my personal life. And it became clear for me when I’ve read about the reflective domains and started to question myself about my own domains. After the weekly activity, I just got stuck. It was one of those moments of this course when I realized how much I lost to have a clear vision of them before in my academic life.

I’ve been focused on what to do but never looked back carefully. Worst than that, I realized that I didn’t have the vocabulary to build this classification. The reflexive domains simply give me a new way to do a proper reflection. And after that, I found some unpleasant truths about my progress and other pleasant aspects. It ultimately helped me bring to my academic and personal life a better overview of my goals and how to achieve them. Finally, I’m not using entirely new technics; in the end, I’m bringing some of my tools from my professional life and adapting them to my personal life.

My domain reflections

After reviewing my previous post and drafts, I realized how much I talked about the dispositional domain. Time management and related constraints are a constant in my life. It’s clear to me how much I have to improve them and how hard it’s to find a proper academic tool. In opposition to this clear vision, I never analyzed my discipline and didn’t realize how it affect my studies. Otherwise, I identified some locks around my fears, expectations, and frustrations, linking this domain directly to my affective domain. 

I’m emotionally stable; at least I’m capable of identifying most of my emotions and sentiments. For the situations when I can’t, which happens very often, I do therapy. This level of awareness it’s been fundamental to my life. I’m constantly finding and facing fears and frustrations. I have to understand my emotions because I’m profoundly dedicated to my family and special to my son. I could say that his birth was a trigger for me to start reviewing my affectional domain. This conscience of my feelings enables me to see where I’m having difficulty and separate what a practical and real challenge is and where I’m just trying to escape from reality.

I always considered myself a quick learner, and it’s been true for most of my life, but this is just because I was always learning some content correlated to my previous experiences. Since I moved to Brussels, I’ve been spending some time learning french, and oh boy, this is hard. I’m still didn’t felt comfortable and neither evolve as I first expected. Something related had happened when I tried to learn about Shaders inside of Unity. Only reading, I couldn’t apply the knowledge, and I had to look in forums and videos, and Youtube became a good alternative. 

The method that I was using to learning and the method that I use to produce are different things, and both talk to each other. This understanding made me feel much more comfortable when studying English. Then I started to write and tried to be more patient with myself when learning a new technique to use in game development. The combination of practice and patience turned out to be the fundamentals to my evaluation and on the construction of my learning path.

Sadly I’ve discovered in myself a massive gap in my interpersonal domain. I rarely engaged in conversations with my peers on the forum; I don’t have any social media and don’t know how to participate in any community. I’ll spend some effort evaluating and improving. And I think this always happened in my life, for a lot of different reasons. After the migration, and with the language and cultural barriers, it became much more evident.

Setting up goals

All those points helped me to define my first SMART goals; I focused at this time only on what I know I can do in the next feel weeks with a small time-frame to, in fact, test the utility from this tool. 

Following the keyword meaning:

Specific

Measurable

Archievable

Relevant

Time-bound

I will relate them with the domains that I mostly talked about and less talked about over the past few weeks: disposition and interpersonal domain goals. I’m putting a time-frame starting on 7th December.

To improve my time-management and discipline so I can easily achieve my study goals, I will have a clear and consistent practice, which will improve my production and ultimately help me finish the course. I’ll do this by adopting a schedule with a time-box of two hours, followed by daily planning and retrospective analyzing my progress. I’ll follow the daily scrum questions and track my progress in mini sprints of 3 days.

To improve my interpersonal domain to leverage my social engagement and create a network and make better usage of the community that I’m inserted, I’ll commit myself to comment in two other posts besides my own in the threads that I participate and will turn on the camera on every webinar. I will track my progress in a spreadsheet just to have some control.

References

What is a Sprint Retrospective? (no date) Scrum.org. Available at: https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-a-sprint-retrospective (Accessed: 3 January 2021).