MARRIAGE AND FAMILY THERAPISTS Discussion 3

take an honest look at your own skills and progress. You would not be at this point if you did not already possess some good skills, and now it is time to build on these skills to help you be the best graduate student and MFT you can become. Do you feel confident in some skills but perhaps anxious about your performance in other areas? That is pretty natural at this point. This course was not meant to perfect your skills, only to provide an introduction to the ones you will need to develop in order to be successful. To progress further, you need to make a candid evaluation of just where you’d like to improve. We suggest that in this part of the Success Guide you discuss your strengths and the areas where you could improve. By identifying both strengths and areas where you need further help in skill building you can help your Instructors and your Academic Advisor to direct you to additional resources and in our resource data bank that can help you develop skills even as you learn the material you’ll be studying in your courses.

Part 2: Program Resources.

In this course, you have picked up a lot of tips and tools for success here. While they’re still fresh in your mind, compile a toolbox for yourself. Write down the tips that were important to you, make a few notes about how they can help, and compile this into a guide that you can use throughout your program.

Part 3: Motivation Touchstone.

As you undertake your graduate degree you will likely face a multitude of pressures and constraints. That’s great – you know you are growing if your problems are different problems from the ones you had earlier! To keep your spirits up, prepare a touchstone, something you can turn to when the going gets tough that can motivate you. This might be an image of yourself getting that degree, or a picture of your family and support team, or even just a lovely image that really helps you relax and refresh.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.