Monday, July 12, 2010

Personality Inventory

Ever since I've been done with The-Test-That-Must-Not-Be-Named, I haven't visited the CollegeBoard website, but in midst of my "what major to do in college crisis" (more about that later, perhaps), I landed upon an old personality inventory that I took in junior year (for those interested, it's part of the MyRoad module CollegeBoard has for all members). Partially out of curiosity and mostly out of boredom, I retook the inventory (alright, I admit it. It was mostly out of curiosity).


For the most part, I'm still relatively similar to the person I was in junior year. I still like working by myself, I find crowds slightly uncomfortable, I like to plan ahead, I moderately like change, and the future is something that concerns me.


For most of the questions, you choose how left or right you lean on a spectrum between two statements. For example:


I like a lot of change in my world; too little change is boring

(Strongly)

(Mostly)

(Somewhat)

(Unsure)

(Somewhat)

(Mostly)

(Strongly)

I like stability in my world; too much change bothers me


More often than not, when I did refine an old answer, I opted for the "unsure" option. I questioned a bit how my 16 year old self clicked so confidently checked "strongly" for so many of the prompts. I suspect that I was skewing my answers to convince myself I was more defined than I actually was. I always treated those personality inventories as some sort of competition, as if there was a winner in getting a certain 4 letter personality ID. Now in my crisis of not knowing what I want to do in college, I retook that inventory as honestly as I could, and found it more difficult than I expected.


I ended up scoring as an ENTZ (I got an INTZ in junior year), but my individual section scores were pretty deflated, a couple of them bordering between "slight" and "clear." I feel like I should be able to coherently and elegantly summarize a lesson learned from all of this, but I can't. All I really feel is that slight discomfort knowing that I maybe don't know what I want to do in life as well as I convinced myself during my high-and-mighty, life-will-do-my-bidding phase.


Oh man, college, here I come.

1 comment:

  1. Look through the course guide and pick out the courses that sound most interesting, then figure out which major encompasses the majority of those!

    ReplyDelete