INSTRUCTIONS:
Pick one of the three questions for the essay. You can use the textbook, lecture notes, blogs, original research articles, etc. The paper should be more than one page and no more than two pages (double spaced, 1-inch margins) long. This does not include the reference list. Q1. Personality and Career ChoiceDescribe your personality and discuss how it relates to your career path. What career are you pursuing? Why are you pursing it? How did you decide on this career path? How does it relate to your personality? Use the 30 facets from Chapter 3 and explain for each facet how your standing relates to your career choice. Which of your traits make it easier / harder to pursue this career? Aside from personality traits, how do other attributes (values, attitudes, interests, talents/skills) play in to your career choice? Q2. Stability and Change of Personality. As we discussed in Lecture 5, we all have some characteristics we like about ourselves and some characteristics we like to change. Stability for characteristics that we do not like about ourselves poses a question. Why don’t we just change? To answer this question, I challenge you to a self-experiment. Pick a characteristic that you would like to change (e.g., shyness) and try to act different from your usual self (e.g., strike up a conversation with a stranger). Then report on your personal experience with this self-experiment. Did you find it hard to change your behavior? How did you feel when you acted different? What did you learn about yourself from this exercise? Relate your personal experience to the scientific evidence about stability and change. [Don’t do anything crazy or immoral and blame me for it. Remember this course is about variation in normal personality traits.] Q3. An Ideographic Analysis of a Well-Known Personality (e.g., Donald Trump)Nomothetic research examines patterns of relationships across individuals. This information is abstract, but it can be used to make sense of individuals. Pick a famous person and interpret their lives with the help of the Big Five traits and their facets. For each of the facets (Chapter 3) indicate whether you think the person is high, average, or low and provide some information about the person to support your personality impression. Then relate major events in the person’s life to their personality. What events may have influenced their personality? How did their personality influence their lives?