Jointly reported by:
Tan Qing Lin Sr3ScA
Wong Tze Sin Sr3ScA
On the 17th of July, the Counselling Department invited AUG Student Services to provide assistance to Senior Middle Three students, to help them determine their personalities and pave their future career paths. Only 50 slots were allocated for the event. AUG Services’ counselling was conducted by Ms Peggy Heng and Ms Linda Lam. The counselling services included assisted placement into the best possible courses and institutions based on one’s credentials and career goals via one-to-one counselling sessions, informative seminars, and many more, acting as a career GPS.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality test to help students and adults discern their characters and utilise these complementary advantages. This test provides a valuable reference for Senior 3 students’ personal development and career planning for their future preparations. MBTI is the most trusted and accurate personality test since its establishment in 1995 and has been utilized by 88% of the top 500 companies in the world. A Swedish psychologist, Carl Jung, came up with a personality theory which was then further improved by two American educationists. According to Jung’s theory, our living environment has a great influence on our behaviours; he believes that even though we have inherited certain personality traits, our surroundings can help us make a change.
Jung’s theory focuses on four basic psychological dimensions:
1. Extroversion vs. Introversion
2. Sensing vs. Intuition
3. Thinking vs. Feeling
4. Judging vs. Perceiving
These dimensions can be used to assess and determine various learning styles and ways of living. Students were required to choose between two options based on their preferences and intuition. All students were required to answer the provided questionnaire with an honest and clear mindset.
Soon after the test, Ms Peggy explained how people with different personalities react under the same circumstances for students to have a deeper understanding of themselves.
Sensitive and intuitive students were divided into two groups via breakout rooms on Zoom video platform. Both groups were given a picture and had to jot down what they observed. Surprisingly, after returning to the main room, both groups explained their observations with significant differences. For students who were more sensitive, they paid a lot of attention to the details in the picture. On the other hand, intuitive students explained the overall vibe that the picture showed.
Ms Linda further explained this phenomenon by breaking down how these two personalities contributed to different people’s perspectives in life. As sensitive people are more attentive, they often obtain information or knowledge by learning every single detail about it, whereas for intuitive people, they like to imagine how certain things work when they are learning something. Through this, it helped students to understand which study techniques were more suitable for them.
After this session, thinking and feeling groups were formed and given a scenario. Both groups had to give an explanation on what they would do in that situation. After finalising their thoughts, they also found out different personality traits have different approaches to the same issue.
Ms Linda then utilised the personality test that students had done to show which career paths suited them the most. Although the MBTI test comes with 16 personality types, several types often share the same career field.
“The MBTI test allows us to find the balance between the opposite poles of our personalities in a right way in order to carry out different things in life,” said Ms Linda at the end of the three-hour long event.
