Personal Reputation and Behavior
Thinking of my own experience working with others and feedbacks that I've received recently, I would say being reliable is one of my reputation that I developed since freshman year.
I value efficiency and hate procrastinating. So whenever I work with others or I work alone, I have the habit to make a plan and stick to my schedule. In my typical day, after I went back home from classes, I would list the things that I need to finish today and write them in the app "evernote". Then I started working, checking one by one until finish all the work. I found this work well for me because when I check something out after I finish the work, the feeling of achievement motivates me to keep going. So that's the reason I've never missed any due day for homework, paper or anything.
In the terms of working with others, I always keep a self-motivated pace and impact others as well. As the assistant treasurer in my organization, I'm not only responsible for the budget, also I take care of many things during meeting and assign works within financial department. Every time we have meeting, I would always organize the notes and future plans to every member right after the meeting in order to keep everyone be aware of the work they need to do and start preparing for it as early as possible. And recently we have a mini workshop. After I received the material list from other department, on that day I finished the budget planning for the materials and contacted president to make sure the budget was fine. The very next day I purchased the materials and got everything we need for our workshops so no one would worry about the process of workshop. But emergency happens. The night before workshop the president just realized that we didn't get name tags. So after I received the message I asked one of the members to check bookstore to see if we can get any. Fortunately we got the name tags and successfully held our workshop.
Since I'm naturally self-motivated to solve the problem and be willing to use any approaches that I can think of and sometimes ask other's help to achieve goals, people who work with me especially rate me as very reliable and can be trusted.
But there was one time that I somehow abandoned my reputation because some opportunistic behaviors. Last semester I had a busy schedule for 18 credits and had a group project had to be finished on the day with two midterms. That week I had crazy schedule and felt stressed. But I received all the information from other group members the day before due day and I needed to put all things into slides to finalize them. In this time I acted opportunistically. Since the project was in the afternoon so I actually only reviewed for my exams and slept early in order to get enough sleep for tomorrow. So I didn't finalize the slides. After that day I had my exams and found that I only had an hour to put all things together. The progress was very hasty because of time limit. So when we presented in the class, it was not good due to the errors I made such as the typos, which made others easy to tell this was not well prepared. I felt guilty though there was nothing I can change.
My group members were so nice and forgave my mistakes. While in my perspective, I should never act that way to break my reputation as being reliable all the time. After that mistake I tried to prepare better in advance and have this habit to double check to make sure everything is taken care of. Trust is fragile. It was not the case that I only change my attitude after other's suspicious of my reliability; instead, I should keep working on and try to do my best in every details so that my reputation can build up continuously.
Of course I'm an outside and can't tell if this is true or not, but in the situation where you described yourself as opportunistic, it seemed you were being too hard on yourself. Did you really have another option? Sometimes people just have too many obligations. Doing them all well is not possible. That means letting go of something is necessary, though figuring out what to let go of is difficult.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that made this easier for me was having children. When they were very young, they were the priority. Everything else had to take second place. I dropped a lot of things at that time. For instance, for the first two years after my older son was born, I stopped going to conferences. I did continue to to teach, of course. But at the beginning sleep was scarce since the baby would get up in the middle of the night. It was very enjoyable being a parent. But the only way to manage it was to drop a lot of other stuff.
Sometimes I think students take on too many obligations, because they don't understand what doing the job well requires regarding effort. Doing few things but doing them well then may be wise, but one has to experience situations like the one you talked about to come to that realization.
I actually do feel there are so many obligations and the worse thing is that I try to do everything as good as possible. That is really sweet of you to share that and I admire your choice a lot! Sometimes it is hard for me to make choices, partly because I'm eager to try everything and develop myself. But more often I put too many responsibilities on myself. And I realized that if I put my efforts to everything, that's exhausting and I can't make everything perfect. Thank you so much for your advice. I would try to put myself into fewer obligations in order to do them well, at least the best I can.
DeleteAnd Happy Thanksgiving!