A few final words

This finished off my series of posts about the MBTI, most of the stuff I learned in my PD1 (professional development 1) class this past semester.
There are a couple of things I wanted to mention before the end.

First, all this stuff has been heavily researched and all that and lots of other places can explain it probably better than I can. So if I didn't quite get something right, I probably misunderstood something (example: intuition/sensing is very confusing, and I just hope I have finally understood it).

Second, we were told this several times: these preferences are just that. Preferences. They are not to be excuses. I needed to hear this when I found myself using some of my preferences as excuses for why I did act out of my preference when it would have been better if I had.

And last, you are perhaps (or perhaps not) wondering what my own preferences are. Well, I am an INTJ. Those letters stand for introvert, intuitive, thinking, judging.
The N stands for intuition because the I was already used for introvert. E, S, F, and P all stand for extrovert, sensing, feeling, and perceiving respectively. So, if you've ever taken something and gotten some combination of four letters that looks something like that, it's probably your MBTI type. ISTJ is the most common set of preferences for engineers with the INTJ's coming up closely behind it. So I am a pretty typical engineer...good thing I'm majoring in it.


UPDATE: Oh yes! and one very last thing which I meant to say but forgot: The preferences are not meant to categorize your whole entire personality. Do not think that it does! It has nothing to do with you artistic inclinations, your musical preferences, whether you are shy or not, etc.... It is mainly for those preferences that will affect teams and groups. A team with personality conflicts will tend to have these conflicts mainly with the MBTI preferences. So they are useful for group situations. Occasionally it is good to recognize them in other situations too, but not necessarily. Okay that really is the end now.

Judging vs. Perceiving

I have recovered from the week of finals and study and, having collected my grades, am now enjoying a bit of repose with my family before starting work for the summer. (Research in heat transfer, pressures, temperatures, heat fluxes, etc.)
So 'tis high time for the last dichotomy of the MBTI dichotomies.

This dichotomy concerns how people interact with the outside world, with external factors. The judging and perceiving words can be most misleading to a lot of people. I think these may be the ones most widely different from their usual meanings (though the introvert/extrovert may be most misunderstood).

A judger tends prefers order and organization. They may like to write lists. In a group setting, they will probably attempt to form some type of structure for the group and will schedule as many things as they can.

A perceiver prefers to leave things more open-ended. They can find too much structure to be stifling.

As with all the others, just because one has a preference does not mean that person cannot act in one of the other preferences. Judgers can deal with spontaneity and even be spontaneous at times, they just tend to prefer more scheduling. Some people think judgers are more competent than perceivers, i.e. they will get more work done sooner and better. But this is not true. Perceivers may not organize things in ways that managers of groups like, but they can still be extremely competent.

I had the most experience with conflicts in groups caused by this differences in preference of this particular dichotomy. This past semester I was in a design group of seven people. Five had perceiving preferences and two had judging preferences. The entire group as a whole worked more as perceivers. We scheduled things as little as possible, set up no leadership, and generally let people work on the pieces of our design as they wished. Whenever we met for a meeting outside of class (which only occurred when we had reports and presentations due), the judgers organized the pieces for everyone to do and we sat and did them. The perceivers were mostly happy with the arrangement, but the judgers felt the project could have been done faster with more scheduling. But we did get the project done and turned in on time.

At Last!!!!

The last class of the semester was today!!!!
And now I don't know what to do with myself.

I guess I'll just have to post random things and watch you-tube videos and eat cookies...

Project done!

Our design project is done! We finished it last night and showed it to our class this morning. Now we just have to turn in our report and give a nice professional presentation to the class and we'll be done with the course!

Of course the next question is: what do we do with the project now?
One of my teammates suggested blowing it up.

Above is my dear sister at our Christian group's semester semi-formal this evening.

It is one of my favorite events of each semester. Whoohoo! I danced my feet off and now we're both exhausted!

At present, she's washing off her feet. There's no words for how dirty our feet get after these dances. Can't dance in high-heels, so we all kick our shoes off.
Anyway, it was grand, and now I'm hungry.

The Last Crunch

It is that time of the semester again.
I call it the last crunch...
When two projects, one exam, two concerts, and two presentations are all coming at you within about five days it seems like a good name for the time of semester.
But don't worry.
This won't start until next Friday when the first project is due.

But in the meantime, Happy Spring!
We have dandelions and forget-me-nots and yellow jackets and ants here now!

Thinking vs. Feeling

The third dichotomy of type is the thinking vs. feeling dichotomy. And again, these words mean something a little bit different than you might think.

This dichotomy is about how one makes decisions.

A thinker usually looks for rules or standards that can be applied to all situations. They tend to pull themselves out of the issue at hand to look at it as objectively as possible and to hopefully find some rule to apply to it.

A feeler tries to understand all points of view in the situation or issue. They look at each situation in a case by case system.

One should not confuse feeling and thinking with being emotional or being logical. Both can come to the same decision; they'll just reach their conclusions by different methods. Both can be extremely good, clear, and logical thinkers. It's just how they look at the situations that makes them different.