By Xin Peng (aka Lily)
As a first-year I/O student at UTA who has just accomplished her first semester’s study in a new country, I owe a lot of ‘thank you’ letters to people in this program, including both students and professors. In the eyes of an international student, Industrial/Organizational Psychology is indeed a very challenging major because this major greatly emphasizes communication skills, presentation skills, and writing skills, which are exactly to the disadvantage of international students. However, from another perspective, these disadvantages indicate that there is much room left for us to improve, which is totally a good thing. These obstacles act like a beacon broadcasting a directional signal for what we should do.
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| First (soon to be second!)-year student Lily Peng |
As a first-year I/O student at UTA who has just accomplished her first semester’s study in a new country, I owe a lot of ‘thank you’ letters to people in this program, including both students and professors. In the eyes of an international student, Industrial/Organizational Psychology is indeed a very challenging major because this major greatly emphasizes communication skills, presentation skills, and writing skills, which are exactly to the disadvantage of international students. However, from another perspective, these disadvantages indicate that there is much room left for us to improve, which is totally a good thing. These obstacles act like a beacon broadcasting a directional signal for what we should do.
The most meaningful thing I learned from last semester is that one needs to have a specific goal in mind before taking action. Take the group project from the Employee Attitudes and Behavior class as a small example. This group project was to assess employee attitudes in one organization and give some recommendations based on the assessment results. To be honest, I think our group did a wonderful job in this class project and one successful factor, I believe, was that we had a very specific direction. The client organization asked us to investigate the workload problem of managers as a follow-up of a prior survey. So all the work we did was about workload. We interviewed managers about their workload; we searched for workload literature and looked for some performance outcomes related to workload; we disseminated workload surveys to managers; and we analyzed the data and linked the recommendations with the workload problem. In conclusion, because we had a straightforward goal, our recommended next steps to the client have the possibility to be a success.
My upcoming job search is similar to the group project except that the goal of the group project was picked by the client organization but the direction of the job search should be chosen by me. Before I open the websites and crazily search for internships, I may sit down and think about my direction for a while. What do I want to do? What is my ideal future profession like? What are the competencies I have that will help me to achieve my goals? What else can I do to approach my intended direction?
