Ideation: Brainstorming Exercises
Identifying your core values — those deeply rooted beliefs principles that guide you — will allow you to tie various aspects together into a cohesive narrative
This lesson is short, sweet, and deceptively difficult. Your task is to figure out 2-3 core values that you feel best guide and define your beliefs and life choices. Obviously we can believe in and adhere to many more than 2-3 values, but for the purpose of this exercise it is best to narrow down to a short list.
This exercise is useful in several ways:
Identifying your core values can help you clarify why you do what you do. Students almost never struggle to articulate what they have achieved—winning a sports tournament, launching a charitable endeavor, or creating a piece of art. However, what you have done is often less important than why you’ve done it. Why gets to the central question of who you really are. Understanding your core values is a requisite step in understanding your motivations for past achievements and projecting who you will be as a university student and, later, as an alumnus.
Your core values can also act as an overarching theme that unify and connect the various aspects of your life into a coherent narrative. If you find - as many do - that you are relatively well rounded but don’t have any once signature achievement, you can structure the narrative in your personal statement to articulate the different ways your life exemplifies X, Y, or Z value. This can make for a really compelling essay (if executed correctly).
This activity is a central prerequisite to our later lesson on tying all of the ideation activities together. Even if this short exercise doesn’t reveal any new profound truths to you, it will be incredibly useful to the last lesson in the ideation stage (so just do it!).
Key Takeaways:
Use the Values Exercise document (below) to identify 2-3 values that are central to who you are.
Write several sentences about why each value is important to you.