What is the Purpose of and Academic Portfolio?
As part of your degree program to complete a masters degree you may be required to compile an academic portfolio. This portfolio is simply a collection of the projects you completed as part of your course of study. You may also include an unoficial transcript of the courses that you took to acquire your degree and a copy of your resume.
You may, in reality, include anything that you wish but the object is to make a professional presentation. The purpose for an academic portfolio is hardly academic but to highlight your accomplishments to perspective employers. This will be in addition to other documents you submit to a perspective employer like your resume and references. Samples of academic papers demonstrate your writing skills and many professional positions require good communication skills, both oral and written. Participation in team projects will demonstrate that you are a team player. The combination of team and individual projects demonstrate that you are a competent candidate with the ability to collaborate on projects when necessary.
So how do you go about compiling your portfolio? Start by gathering all the papers you wrote and any projects you completed while you were in your program of study. Hopefully you retained copies of these materials and did not destroy the originals once they were submitted. You should have archival copies if you used a computer to create the documents and backed up your system.
Putting it Together
After you have collected the materials to include in your portfolio, how do you assemble them?
Print the materials on high quality paper and bind them together with a cover page and table of contents. If you will present your portfolio to a specific individual at a company, you should put that person's name and the name of the company on the cover page. Use headings like:
Prepared for Jim Tischler
Director of Information Systems
ABC Company
You can be much more creative, however, if you publish your portfolio on the web. You probably have the ability to create a personal web page to go along with your e-mail account if you subscribe to an ISP for your Internet connection. This web page would be a perfect place to publish your portfolio. You can then add a link to your Academic Portfolio on your resume. If you created an elctronic web based resume, you would add your link ub=nder your contact information.
