concept map

With my concept map, I wanted to figure out what I should concentrate on in order to succeed more in Public Relations, which is my major. I wanted to take all my ideas of what makes a good public relations worker, and organize it into categories and relationships towards each word or idea.

I used the same technique as we used in class for the example because I found it very helpful, so first after I thought of my main idea, P.R, i wrote down all of the words I could think of that had to do with it. After that, I put Public Relations in the center and started to struggle. I couldn't decide which words to branch off directly from the middle.

I decided to take the words that I thought were most broad, or most general. This seemed to help because after I added 5 words directly to the main idea, all my other words seemed to fit perfectly into those categories, and after looking at the map, many of the words connected to one another as well!

Overall, the concept map really helped me organize my ideas and helped me to see the relationship between them. I learned that mostly everything in Public Relations links to each other in one way or another and that not one aspect is more important than another. I realized that even my random words that I had written down when thinking of Public Relations ended up fitting somewhere in the map!

Mind Maps

The first mind mapping assignment ended up being more interesting than I thought! On my first map, I was trying to see what I needed to do in order to be successful. I wanted to see what my priorities were, and what they needed to be in order for me to reach my goals.

After my first 20 minutes of doodling, I realized that all the words I thought of that linked to success would not help me in actually reaching success. I wrote words like "fear" "happiness" and "money." This was a problem for me because none of these things, fear, happiness, and money would lead me to success, and my goal of the mind map was trying to figure out what would. I put down my markers and walked away and got my mind off of the assignment for a bit.

After a while, I came back to the project and finished the map. I added some more things that came to mind. As I started adding colors and small doodles, more actually came to mind. I learned that I have to really look into the map to see what is important to me, and what aspects about me that will and won't lead me to success.




After finishing my first mind map, I realized that I needed to be more specific in my "central idea" to solve my problem of How will i become successful? and what does success mean for me." I moved onto the second map and decided my central idea should be goals, because if I achieve my goals, hopefully this means I have found success.

I did not run into as many problems with the second mind map. I tried to decide how I could make my map creative, yet organized at the same time. The phrase "a road to success" popped into my head, so I themed the map as a road. I noticed that the words weren't coming freely to me and that I was pausing and thinking about what to write, this was a problem because mind maps are supposed to be about word associations, not in depth thoughts.

I decided to continue for a few minutes, then walk away for a bit. Getting away from the map seemed to solve my problem again. As soon as a sat down again later on I tried to let my mind flow freely as I added more images than words. After I doodled and added lots of images, i started associating them with words and writing them down, then more associations came to mind!

Overall, I really enjoyed the assignment, and after looking at the maps, I really did learn somethings about myself and about my priorities, goals, and what is really important to me in life. Mind maps are a great way to plot out your problems!