Required Components

Your e-portfolio will include the following parts and features:

Portfolio introduction

This will be your e-portfolio’s home page. At minimum, the introduction should briefly note the e-portfolio’s purpose(s) and audience(s) and overview its organization and parts, perhaps through a table of contents with links.

Personal purpose statement

This will communicate your identity and goals as a learner and future professional. This is a very concise story about who you are and what are your goals, which foregrounds your most important experiences and qualities. One way to begin drafting this page is to brainstorm three or four words that best describe you and your motivations for learning and goals as a future professional.

Examples of your best work

The bulk of your portfolio will be comprised of work that best showcases and explains your planning and writing skills in the best possible light for your audience(s). It will include at least one example of each of the following ‘genres’ of writing, which correspond to major types of writing done in planning and related fields.

  1. Place-based description/field reporting. Effective description is the foundation of geographical communication, helping readers visualize places through concise communication—textual or graphical—of factual data. It can take diverse shape, but examples include: site reports, landscape interpretation, map and geovisual description and interpretation, travel writing and journalistic reporting, or existing conditions analysis.

  2. Graphical thinking and communication. Planners think and communicate visually. Geospatial analysis and mapping are fundamental to planning. Your portfolio could include examples of your best GIS projects, demonstrating your ability to organize, analyze, and represent spatial data. Most students also have developed the ability to do visual renderings, such as editing images or urban design. Other examples might include a multimedia website, video, map, and report with maps, diagrams, and tables.

  3. Independent written research. Research is an essential skill for planners. Written research demonstrates your ability to identify a practical problem, relate it to key concepts and debates, ask a research question, and answer that question through relevant sources and methods. It should describe original findings and draw relevant conclusions. Because such writing develops in-depth analysis, such writing is typically lengthier and more text-oriented.

  4. Professional, collaborative report or plan. A staple of the planning profession is the report or plan, which seeks to understand urban issues and propose solutions. They embody the analytical process of planning, which includes: problem identification, goal setting, existing conditions analysis, best practices research, description of alternative strategies, and recommendations. Unlike in-depth research papers, plans are typically written by teams to be concise, clearly structured, and graphically rich. They are carefully formatted and designed for diverse audiences. They might have been written collaboratively, in which case it is important to state that clearly and give attribution to all the authors.

  5. Public presentation. To communicate with the general public, planners present their work in formats like visual presentations and posters. These highlight key ideas and elements in a very concise and graphically rich format, often distilled from lengthier documents or plans. Such communication strategies should engage the general reader with high-level information, but also provide sufficient depth for more engaged readers.

Accompanying narrative and reflection

Each example of your work should include a few sentences identifying it, helping readers make sense of it (topic, why and for whom you wrote it), highlighting the kinds of knowledge and skills you gained, and reflect on how it contributed to your development as learner and aspiring professional. These explanatory sentences afford you the opportunity to reflect upon and share your knowledge, skills, and qualities in specific writing situations. And it will help readers see how these examples contribute to a body of work that represents what you have learned and what you can do.