Benefits of Professional and Personal Journaling

Open journal with pen placed on top

During these unprecedented times, it can be easy for time to feel like a blur. The hours pass by without notice (“Oops, I just spent two hours watching cooking videos on YouTube!”) and everything can feel kind of monotonous. Journaling can be a great way to organize not only your thoughts about the present, but also the past and the future. In this blogpost, we will be talking about some of the types and benefits of journaling, which might help you to stay on track this summer.

Navigation

  1. Types of Journaling
  2. Journaling as Self-Care
  3. Ideas for Getting Started

Types of Journaling

Journaling can be for both personal and career purposes, and it can take many forms—none of the forms are exclusive. After all, journaling is a way to help you succeed; it is not an assignment, and each person has different needs. Here are some of the ways people use journals, some of which may match your needs, and some of which may not. 

Career Journaling

Career journaling can be a useful way to determine what your interests are, keep a record of career-related experiences, learn to understand career missteps, and record advice from mentors. We are constantly being asked by various employers and graduate schools to recount our experiences and achievements and update our resumes. Keeping a career journal can make that process so much easier. 

1. HCEC Journaling/Pre-Health Journaling

The Health Careers Evaluation Committee at Cornell advises that pre-health students keep a working document that gives them a space to reflect on their career goals, and why they would like to pursue a career in healthcare at different points in their career: prior to applying, before the HCEC interview, and before beginning the graduate school application process. A document of suggested questions can be found here.

A more detailed version of HCEC journaling is described here. This post describes how some pre-health students have found value in chronicling their clinical experiences and volunteering experiences—what it felt like to engage in them, significant moments, projects they completed, accomplishments, and what they learned. This can be a good way to keep a record of the hours you have completed and contact information for places you have worked at in the past, which many graduate school applications ask for. Students who engaged with this have stated that it helped them to recall experiences that were valuable to bring up in interviews, especially because preparation for professional school often takes place over several years. 

2. LSC E-Portfolio 

The Learning Strategies Center offers an e-portfolio service that lets you reflect upon the connections between your classes, community service, internships, work experiences and beyond. By combining your activities through guided reflections, you can come to a better understanding of how your experiences can fit into future endeavors. A good place to begin is the Generative Knowledge Interview, where you can reflect upon your life’s values and the experiences that led to it. Check out the Integrative Knowledge e-Portfolios at http://lsc.cornell.edu/e-portfolio/

Personal Journaling

Even more so than career journaling, personal journaling is whatever you make of it. Your journal could be as artistic or as bare bones as you like. Some use journals as a central location to store daily to-do lists, important deadlines, and books they’d like to read to keep them on-track with their goals and timelines, while others write full-page entries. Others use journals as a place to reflect on what they were grateful for that day, and to learn from mistakes they may have made. Still others use journals as creative outlets to store their doodles, drafts, and ideas for new designs.

1. Bullet Journaling

A widely used format for personal journaling is bullet journaling. Bullet journaling helps you optimize productivity in whatever sense that means to you. You can choose to make daily, weekly, or monthly spreads to organize your tasks, spill out all your thoughts through rapid logging, and take notes of anything you want. Essentially, it can be an organized central hub of information for your life.

Two Career Assistants, Anita and Angella, incorporate the following aspects into their bullet journals, which might give you some ideas:

  • To-do lists on a weekly spread
  • Daily journaling
  • Keeping track of recurring assignments
  • Gratitude tracking
  • Notes from presentations, seminars, and webinars
  • Keeping track of bigger tasks and goals as part of a monthly spread
  • Keeping track of good times and books through spreads with Polaroid photos
  • Habit tracker (exercise, sleep, mood, meditation)
  • Prayer journal
  • Keeping track of dates and moments to look forward to
  • Reflecting on major moments in life
  • Logging ideas that come up during the day
  • Mistake reflection
  • Doodling 

2. Food Journaling

A journal can also be a good place to store recipes, things to buy, and what worked or didn’t work about a recipe. They can also be used for tracking calories and being conscientious of what you eat every day, so that you can be more cognizant of your health. 

3. Prompt Journaling

Some people find that they would rather focus on using the journal for self-reflection. For this purpose, prompt journaling is best. Each day, you would answer either the same prompt or a different prompt of your choosing, such as “Describe one thing that surprised you today”. After some time, you will be able to look back at what you have written, and see how your thoughts or mindset may have changed over time. 

Journaling as Self-Care

Journaling can help us manage and reduce stress through reflection. Check out this document to read more about the benefits of journaling: https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-health-benefits-of-journaling/

Even if you don’t have to time write out your thoughts everyday, even a quick 5-10 minutes at the end of the day to write out three things you were grateful for during that day can make a significant difference over time. Research has shown that gratitude leads to higher GPA and better social integration in college1, lower levels of stress and depression for first-year college students2, and better quality and quantity of sleep3

Ideas for Getting Started

Here is a list of things you’ll need in order to start journaling:

  • A notebook (lined or dot-grid, digital or physical, blank or pre-filled—it’s all up to you!)
  • A pen (or a keyboard)

That’s all! It’s that simple. 

Resources for Personal Journaling:

  • If you are interested in bullet journaling or looking for inspiration, check out the official bullet journal website, read The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll, or check out Pinterest and Youtube to learn how to set up a bullet journal!
  • At the end of the day, try writing down three things that you were grateful for
    • Examples
      • “I am grateful that I got to call my friend from high school, X, today. It was nice to catch up with them and talk about how things have changed.
      • “I am grateful that I got to work on my hobby, X, today”
      • “I am grateful that I ate good food today!”

Resources for Career Journaling:

  • Try writing down everything that you have accomplished today, from writing an important email, to finding a particular result in the laboratory, to organizing an informational interview with someone you admire
    • Examples:
      • Finished organizing the budget for my club’s upcoming Meet and Greet
      • Completed the data analysis for my honors thesis
      • Applied to join the XYZ team

Journaling for Pre-Med Students:

  • Try answering some of the journaling prompts suggested by the HCEC
    • Questions include:
      • Why do you want to be a physician/dentist/health care professional?
      • What life events or activities have changed you the most in the past 3-4 years, and what have you learned from them? 
  • Document and reflect on your experiences with patients or with healthcare workers, especially the ones that stood out as being particularly meaningful
    • What this could look like
      • During my hospital volunteer shift on [date], I spoke with a patient who explained to me that he couldn’t eat solid food because of aspiration. It took him a while to come up with the words because his voice was hoarse, but I gave him the time and space to speak. He constantly had his call lights on, and the HUC told me to not answer them because he kept on asking the same question that had already been responded to: “When can I see my physical therapist?” This made me feel even more determined to develop better practices for bedside support. 
      • I called Dr. ABC, a pediatrician, yesterday to talk about her journey to becoming a doctor. Dr. ABC, who told me she originally thought she would be a researcher due to her phobia of blood and needles, discovered that she preferred to work with people. She advised me that if I was also juggling between a research or a medical career, that I should shadow professionals in both fields to get a better idea of their daily work. 

Journaling can seem very overwhelming at the beginning because of how scary it is to start a whole new journal, but I promise that it is okay to have mistakes in your journal, or inconsistencies in formatting. All it takes is putting a pen to paper, and writing on that first page. Feel free to combine any of the journaling types mentioned, and experiment with incorporating different types of pages and lists. This is nowhere near a comprehensive list of everything that people do with their journals, and it is all about what fits best with your lifestyle. There is no perfect journal. I hope that journaling helps you out!