It’s been a while since my last post and it will be a while until I get back into the habitual groove. I thought that I’d take the time to reflect on the past year and here’s how I can summarise it in a sentence:

This was the year where compounding my effort started paying off before anyone noticed.

Reflection

In that previous post, I detailed wanting to balance my professional and personal lives. Given what has been in the mix this year, I can assure you that this has been no easy feat. What has helped me be as successful as I believe I’ve been is the rounded support that I am privileged to possess in both realms. My true introverted self kicks into gear during times of stress and exhaustion where I simply want to take the space to be quiet, regain energy, then continue to step through what’s in front of me. What I’ve been developing is my communication throughout these times… ironic because it’s in these times where I just need quiet and solo reflection time.

From a professional perspective, it’s been a massive year. I accepted an additional position — TFA’s Undergraduate Program Coordinator. This position pulled my hours up to full-time and was almost a carbon copy of my current role, but positioned for a new TFA program. Whilst being in this position, I was able to see different perspectives of the organisation and it highlighted that I am working alongside fantastic, passionate, intuitive, and extremely efficient people. I don’t want to overstate the fact or flog a dead horse, but I truly am incredibly grateful to be working with such amazing people.

What I’ve appreciated about being in this additional role was to understand more of the governance landscape, both from a school and organisation perspective. Additionally, due to the different stream of people that I was assessing (written application and virtual interviews), it was great to converse with people from differing backgrounds, but had the same vision — address educational inequity. Watching these people flow through the pipeline was an interesting experience given the different approach that they typically had to those in the Masters program and it was fascinating to see their unique perspectives and strategies to the concepts that we discuss daily.

Another enjoyable factor for me over this year was creating some documents that have been used between ourselves and an aligned university. Being able to construct a document tracking system enabling task completion for numerous stakeholders has been extremely rewarding. This has had numerous flow-on effects for me, both developing solutions and planning ahead for future projects.

One of the main learnings for me this year was not only about my personal approach to problems and solutions, but updating my way of working. I took the time to write down my pain points with any additional reflections from others and next steps (positive or negative) from an outcome of a pain point remaining or having a solution. Essentially, I improved on documenting my scenario planning. How I would improve on this in the future is attempting to add probabilities of outcomes and construct a decision tree with probabilities that aren’t the standard 50-50 (unknown).

At the beginning of this year, a reflective post outlined what my first year at TFA included. Sure, it was only skimming the surface, but it really hit home how much I had learned and accepted to complete in such a short amount of time. Continuing this practice this year has provided me with deeper knowledge and understanding of processes, consider new and more efficient ways to complete tasks, and start to engineer applications and processes that improve work times.

Thinking back through the past 2 years, I achieved something this week in a matter of minutes given an automated process that I had created at the beginning of last year. There’s that whole temporal payoff moment I had been waiting for! I decided to place one additional step (Form) in for user ease, so we’ll see how this iteration works. I have my intuitive thoughts about how things are going to pan out, but that’s why we test and iterate, is it not? One project that I did iterate a fair bit over this year was the backend of my portfolio website; I think the website has seen a positive impact from this work. The numbers that I observed this year surprised me. Not due to their size, but due to their cause.

How was your year? Have you reflected on it? Have you taken the moment to write it down? Did you reflect last year and did you set a goal for this year? How did your plan compare to the outcome?