Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

Myers Briggs Type Indicator, more casually known as Myers Briggs.

Have you taken this test? It’s a psychometric questionnaire that takes around 15 minutes (give or take) to determine your personality in four letters. I’m not sure how I feel about this–anyway, this was our class today.

Wendy Webb-Robers, Associate Director in the Career Center, trekked on up from the ‘burg to explain our group’s personality dynamic. Apparently the majority of us are “feelers” — not a big surprise, considering the theme of our semester. In fact, out of the 16 of us, only 2 were “thinkers.” We were much more “skewed” in the feeling and perceiving departments, Webb-Robers told us.

To break it down, these are the dichotomies:

Extraversion/Introversion

Sensing/iNtuition

Thinking/Feeling

Judging/Perceiving

Wendy had our group go through some team exercises, splitting us up based on our personality type (this was before she revealed to us what we were). They were pretty revealing about how we thought through things and made decisions — it also made for many LOL moments.

For the first activity, we were given a case where we had to cruelly choose which 3 little league baseball players to cut out from an all-expenses-paid Disney World trip. The thinkers logically suggested holding try-outs to determine who would make the trip. The feelers, on the other hand, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, came up with the idea of hosting a bake sale so that every 8-year-old could come along. Pretty amusing.

Next, Wendy passed out a bunch of M&M packets and told the J’s (people who are organized, planned and approach life with a plan) and P’s (people who tend to be flexible and have a spontaneous approach to life and keep options open) to separate into groups again and construct a house, using these M&M’s.

As a P, my group made a tee-pee out of three of the bags and had symbolic landscaping figures where a cluster of blue was the pool, scattered green M&M’s were the grass, and a scattered yellow, the sun. We were done in no time at all. We couldn’t see what was going on with the J’s, but it took them a lot longer. When we showed each other what we built, the P’s had an abstract piece of art while the J’s had an elaborate mosaic, completely color-coded. They had opened up all the bags and used most of the chocolate. Again, laughs.

The point of this Myers Briggs session was to understand that the office space has different types of people and to be aware how to interact with them and/or utilize their attributes to foster a more productive work environment.

And what was I? According to the assessment, I was classified as an INFP (Introverted Feeling with Extraverted Intuition).

“INFPs are usually fascinated by opportunities to explore the complexities of human personality — their own and others’. They tend to work in bursts of energy and are capable of great concentration and output when fully engaged in a project. They are generally faithful in fulfilling obligations related to people, work, or ideas to which they are committed, but they can have difficulty performing routine work that has little meaning for them.”

How others view my fellow INFP’s:

• Sensitive, introspective, and complex
• Original and individual
• Sometimes difficult to understand

Sounds good to me. Right? Well, the only issue I have is that much of my personality depends on the context of my situation. Many of us had mini-identity crises on whether we truly were what our test said we were. Wendy assured us that our label was not restrictive. That many of us actually adapt to other categories throughout our lives. Whew.

Curious to know what 4-letters identity you? Check out the career center and ask to take the test.