Beyond the Test: Personal Discovery Through a University Project

Dear readers, today I’m gonna talk about a project I had to do for one of my University courses that brought me interesting insights about self-awareness and career paths that I would like to share with you.

This project was divided into two stages.

First, we had to take the famous MBTI personality test.

 

For those who are not familiar, is a test where you answer various questions about your preferences, interests, motivations, etc., and in the end, one of the 16 existing personality types is assigned to you.

I love taking these types of tests, for example, „find out which character from the Twilight saga you are based on your favorite ice cream flavor,“ and the MBTI test, for providing more comprehensive information, truly interested me! The test offers us various descriptions of our personality type in different areas of life, and I found this interesting for us to do self-analysis and improve our self-awareness.

If you want to do the test and discover what your personality type is, or if you want to read the detailed description of all 16 personality types, you can take a look clicking here.

My personality type is INTP-T (Logician), but, what does that mean? Well, quoting the website itself:

„INTP (Logician) is a personality type with the Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Prospecting traits. These flexible thinkers enjoy taking an unconventional approach to many aspects of life. They often seek out unlikely paths, mixing willingness to experiment with personal creativity.“

I don’t want to dwell too much on this subject, as the important thing is not the personality type of the author speaking to you here, but rather what I did with this information.

In the second stage of the project, students were required to answer a sequence of questions provided by the teacher, and this is the interesting part. The first questions was:

What is a dream role for me?

 

When I read the first question, I found myself asking the same question I’ve been struggling with for years and still have difficulty answering to this day. Even though I’ve worked hard on my self-awareness, I still need help understanding what role I want to play in the world or what career path I want to pursue. I’ve confided in friends about this, and the vast majority tell me the same thing – they feel lost, they don’t know what they want to do. I see that the journey of self-awareness is longer than we imagined. 

I tried to answer honestly, analyzing myself deeply, focusing on things that make sense to me, my values, and how my characteristics (which I could better observe with the personality test) influenced my choices in answering the question. After doing this exercise of deep analysis, I arrived at an answer about who I am and who I want to be.

Doing this exercise gave me a clearer vision of myself and my goals, removing that invisible filter of expectations, both ours and from others, that we place on ourselves. It wasn’t easy, but this exercise forced me to look at an issue that I had put on the back burner, ignoring it because it was difficult to deal with not knowing the answer.

Would I like to be an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur? Neither of them? Why?

As a Business student, it would be obvious to answer that my response would be something like „Yes, of course, I would like to be an entrepreneur!“ because that’s the answer I hear most from my classmates. But for me, even before answering whether I would like to pursue this career or not, first, I needed to answer another question that came to me: „What is an intrapreneur?“

Entrepreneur is a famous term that I already knew before starting my college course, but I had never heard of intrapreneur, let alone knew the difference between these two. In case you reader are also confused by these terms, don’t worry, I’ll explain it to you.

Entrepreneur: An entrepreneur is a person who starts, organizes, and operates a business venture, typically taking on financial risks in the pursuit of profit and growth. They have creativity, resilience, initiative, and a willingness to embrace uncertainty and challenges in pursuing their goals.

 

Intrapreneur: An intrapreneur is an employee within a company who takes the initiative to innovate and drive projects forward within the organization’s framework. They possess traits such as creativity, resilience, and a proactive mindset, often championing new ideas and driving change from within the established structure of the company.

These are basic definitions. If you want to learn more about the similarities and differences between entrepreneur and intrapreneur, click here.

After understanding the difference between intrapreneur and entrepreneur, it became clear to me which one I identified with more. I was even able to relate aspects of my personality shown by the test to the position I chose, making it easier to answer why I made that choice. I found it very interesting to answer this question because not only did I learn something new about the business world, but also about myself and how I see myself fitting into this corporate universe.

What traits make me fit for the role?

To answer this question, I needed to analyze all the characteristics of my given personality more closely and which of these I actually see in myself. When answering the question, I exercised my mind to see myself performing the role with the traits of my personality, to see which of my traits would add value and be important to perform a role positively.

When I read my answer, I was happy, I was able to have a kind look at myself in an area (professional) where I put pressure on myself and still deal with insecurities. Self-kindness may seem simple or trivial to some, but for many, unfortunately, it’s difficult to achieve, especially without professional emotional support.

What weaknesses do I have to overcome or compensate for?

Finally, we come to the last question.

As you can imagine from my previous answer, it’s sometimes hard to practice self-kindness when we put too much pressure on ourselves. But here is the exercise I needed to understand my weaknesses, without putting myself in a victim’s place and still maintaining a kind look at them. Here, I stopped to observe some patterns of behavior that I would like to change, mainly concerning others such as impatience, lack of empathy, etc., and even things like insecurities that hinder me in various moments that I would like to overcome. The teacher praised my sincerity; I don’t think it’s so simple or easy for people to open up and talk about the things that bother them about themselves, and it isn’t, but it’s important for us to be honest with ourselves.

Conclusion

The point I want to make is, that what started as a simple college assignment ended up much deeper. Answering these questions was a very interesting exercise for me to get to know myself better, and I think this is extremely important for everything in life, including professionally. Therefore, I leave here my recommendation for you, the reader, to try to exercise and develop your self-awareness, taking advantage of sometimes not-so-obvious opportunities like a simple University assignment.