Career Exploration
One student's journey through the process of discovering a career.
Now that the Career Expo is out of the way, I can write more about different kinds of career exploration, like assessments. At the beginning of the semester, I was asked to decide whether I fit into any of these six categories: helper, thinker, organizer, creator, doer, and persuader. I assessed myself as fitting into the former three. Last week, I took the Focus 2 assessments, a series of five questionnaires that use a ranking system to determine what my personality is like and what my career interests might be. The Work Interest Assessment results are put into a three letter code, called the Holland Code, which determines what three characteristics fit the test taker best. My Holland Code was ASI, which stands for artistic, social, and investigative. In terms of my initial assessment, this corresponds to the creators, helpers, and thinkers. These three categories were not unique to my Work Interest Assessment; in fact, they showed up at the top of my results across all of the assessments, although not always in the same order. While I do not usually label myself as artistic, I can understand why it is there. I have played the violin for nine years, I love to sing (although not usually very well), I am constantly daydreaming, and I used to love drawing and painting in middle school and early high school. However, the reason I did not classify myself as creative is because I have a hard time actually coming up with ideas. If someone throws an idea out there, I can elaborate, expand, or create upon that, but it is difficult for me to come up with that original idea. So while I can be creative, it is usually only after I have found an origin from someone else. I also feel mixed on the social aspect of the code. In my own self-assessment, I did put down that I would be a helper, as I want to do something in life that actually means something and will benefit other people. However, I am very introverted and have a hard time facilitating conversations, so I would not expect to be labeled as “social.” I definitely agree with the investigative aspect of the code, though. As I have mentioned before, I am very math/science minded; I love problem-solving, and I feel great when I can find the answer to a challenging puzzle. What surprised me was how low down in the rankings that was, as I am often told that is my strongest trait. I was also shocked to find that the organizer label that I believed myself to be in my self-assessment was ranked fifth out of six. While it obviously clashes with the artistic component, I am very systematic and tend to follow a strict routine, so it was odd to see that so low. The careers associated with my Holland Code were quite honestly disappointing to me. Many dealt with radio and TV announcing, hosting, and analyzing, all of which seem to come from the social part of my code rather than the other aspects that made more sense to me. The only one I might be interested in is a foreign language interpreter, since I love to travel and learn about other cultures. Even then, though, I am not fluent in any other languages, and I would most likely need to learn many. Some of the other assessments listed jobs I may enjoy, but I had no matches across all five or even four of the five assessments. My results seemed to clash too much with each other to provide any good careers that involve all of them. I want to help others, but I am not very social. I like systematic, organized problem-solving, but I need some room to be creative and have fun. This conflict of interests may be what is making it so difficult for me to decide on a career. More than anything else, this assessment has forced me to see that I may not find something that balances all aspects of my personality; I may just have to decide which ones are the most important to me and stick with those.
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AuthorHello! I'm Tricia Bacon, a sophomore at UNC Chapel Hill and a current explorer of potential careers. Archives
November 2016
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