Curate, connect, and discover
Email to my first year students about the career assessment the university forced on them:
A little over half of you have not taken the assessment yet and you are making the presenter on Monday nervous. Please finish your SII Assessment before the Monday class so you can have it to look at during the class.
To help you find it: on 1/10/24 the link to the Strong Interest Inventory was emailed to all [redacted] students with the subject "SII Assessment,” sent by [redacted].
A note on the results you will get:
These results tell you about yourself now. You are not carved in stone and you will not be the same person (at least in several important ways) as you are today. The career you choose, the work you do, and the life you live will all change you and you will change and adapt to live and thrive in those places as best you can. In some places, your personality will still be stressed no matter how much you adapt. There are parts of you that won't change. The person I became in the past few years to do life in the way I do today is not the same person I was when I was happily chasing mosquitoes around and helping run our restaurant back in early 2000's. Or the person I had to be to thrive in a research lab a few years ago.
The main point is that this assessment tells you about yourself now, but not who you will become or what kind of job you must work to be happy and fulfilled.
You will adapt, improvise, and overcome. Use the assessment to learn about yourself. Maybe you do want some career ideas. Maybe you just want to see which directions you want to grow in based on what you already know you want to do. You realize you don't spring forth from your mother's womb ready to be a nurse, doctor, or research scientist. Or father, mother, spouse, or whatever. You suck at those things in the beginning and learn to do them better. And your personality grows and changes to meet your new challenge.
Our ability to adapt and find unexpected solutions are the keys to human success. (along with being highly social and always having community/help)
If you have dreams and desires that don't line up with what the assessment says, or life goes sideways on you and you end up driving a taxi, understand that for most situations you will change and adapt and learn to become amazing and happy in that new situation. Even if it has a rough beginning.
So take it all with a grain of salt and treat it as a tool, not an oracle.
Peace,
Yours Truly