Payne, D. A., & Johnson, J. M. (2005). Succeeding in graduate school online: Tips from successful students. College Student Journal, 39(1), 117–128.
This article provides additional strategies and resources for ensuring your success as you move forward to the next course in your program and beyond.
Continuing Your Professional Development
Throughout the course, the importance of locating, evaluating, and applying research in both your professional practice and your work as a graduate learner was stressed. To stay current in the research and literature related to your passions and interests in psychology, complete the following:
Use the Journal Alerts page of the Psychology Library Research Guide to learn how to set up a journal alert for the important journals relevant to your interests in psychology. See the specialization tabs for links to individual important journals in your specialization.
Retake the Library Research Knowledge Assessment to see how you are developing proficiency in research and information literacy skills and to identify additional support for continuing your competency in this area.
Competency Reflection
Throughout the course, you worked toward developing the following professional competencies:

Analyze the role of the practitioner-scholar model in guiding professional development.
Evaluate psychological literature in terms of reliability, credibility, ethics, and value.
Analyze the functions, responsibilities, and ethics required of a psychology professional.
Apply critical thinking and effective decision making.
Communicate in a manner that is scholarly, professional, and consistent with expectations for professionals in the field of psychology.
Take some time to reflect on how you have grown in your knowledge and ability to perform these competencies in the past 10 weeks. Also, consider how you will take these competencies forward with you and apply them in your future courses.
Master’s Capstone and Integrative Project
At the end of your program, you will be asked to complete an integrative project, which will provide you with an opportunity to bring all the learning and mastery you will acquire throughout your academic program journey into a single artifact. While you are not required to do any work toward your capstone in this course, keep it in mind as you progress through your academic journey. Write down ideas for potential topics, save journal articles that might be helpful for a literature review, and pay attention to the areas of study that excite you. Doing just a little bit to help prepare yourself as you move through your program will help you when it comes time to work on your integrative project at the end of your program.
Capella Career Center
As you wrap up this course, it is a good time for you to reflect on how you will apply your knowledge on the job and how you can talk about it professionally. Possible opportunities could include performance review conversations, promotion proposals, salary negotiations, résumé accomplishment statements, interview responses, and professional networking conversations.
Here are some of the great Career Center resources available to you:

Welcome to the Career Center.
Career Planning Self-Assessment.
Competency Translator [PDF].
Using Competencies in Your Career Planning [PDF].
Psychology Library Research Guide (MS): Selected Professional Associations.
Career Exploration Guides.
Career Center: Connect.
Connect and Network.
Note on Special Courses
As you advance in your master’s program in psychology, you should be aware of some variation in the design of your courses. While most Capella courses are designed in a consistent manner, it has been found advantageous to vary course design for a small number of special courses. For example, certain high-enrollment courses have been designed to take advantage of the larger number of learners to provide a different kind of learning experience.
In these courses, the instructor, while fully present, takes a back seat to learners’ peer interactions. This type of course will provide you with greater opportunities to refine your professional communication skills. Peer-to-peer assessment can play a major role in helping you develop these skills. Such a course can be a challenging, but very rewarding, learning experience—one in which your success depends upon your wholehearted participation in a shared learning process.

Share how you plan to contribute to your field and the welfare of your clients after you graduate and begin your work as a psychologist.
Share ways you envision yourself giving back to your community beyond practicing in the field.
Share how you might be able to apply the knowledge learned in this course to your life, personally or professionally.
If applicable, include resources to support your post by providing links to credible or scholarly articles, videos, images, or other web resources.
You may also create a slide show or use audio or video as your discussion post.
Label your post with a hashtag (e.g., #Week10) so that others can sort posts by the week’s topic.
Do not create your post as a reply to this pinned post. Instead, use Yellowdig’s Create option to create a new post.
Response Guidelines
Using a minimum of 30 words, respond to one or more posts posted by your fellow learners:
What were your opinions of the plans and dreams your classmates discussed?
How were the contributions of your classmates similar to your own?
Can you think of an example of how the knowledge learned in this course could explain things you have observed or experienced?