Setting Goals

You need to set goals for your field experience and develop a timeline to meet those goals during your final semester. To do this, follow the steps below:

1. After lining up a site and supervisor for your field experience, schedule a meeting (in-person or virtual) with your site supervisor. You will likely need at least one approximately one-hour long meeting to complete these tasks.

2. Align your goals with the MLIS Program Learning Outcomes. This will help you measure your progress throughout the field experience and will help you and your supervisor evaluate your performance at the end of the semester.

3. BEFORE going to the meeting, WRITE DOWN what you hope to do, learn, and accomplish during your field experience. For example, if you are going to work in a public library’s youth services department, you might write down that you’d like to help with programming for the first half of your experience and then design your own program to be offered by the end of the semester. You may also wan to help with reference work during the entire experience; write that down, too.

4. At the meeting, ask what the site supervisor hopes you will accomplish and what projects they might need help with. Make sure you also share your ideas. The two (or more) of you should pool your ideas to come up with a shortlist (perhaps 2-4) of goals for your experience.

5. Don’t stop there. Now you need a plan for how you’ll meet those goals. You need smaller, short-term goals that you can measure throughout the semester. You need to identify tasks that you will complete to gain experience and meet your goals. And you need a timeline for when various tasks will be completed.

6. Build in assessment. How will you, your site supervisor, and the faculty grading your Capstone assess your progress? Are there certain projects you can complete to show what you’ve learned? Are there certain products of your work that you can point to to show progress?

7. At least once during your field experience, sit down with your goals and timeline document and go over it with your site supervisor to gauge your progress and make changes as you both see fit. It’s ok if your goals change partway through the experience, but it’s not ok to not talk about this with your supervisor. We recommend revisiting the goals and timeline about four weeks into the experience and again at the halfway point.

8. Keep track of your progress throughout the experience. This will help with your self-reflection document at the end of the semester.

9. Make sure you include the name, e-mail address, and institution of your site supervisor.