I don’t know how useful they are, but I was playing around with some personality tests last night. Basically I had to list my five most awesome moments in life and then tick off some descriptive action verbs off of a big chart. After doing that, it broke the chart into “personality” characteristics: Artistic, Investigative, Realistic, Social, Conventional, Enterprising.
It turned out (no big surprise) that Artistic came out first, followed by Investigative, Realistic, and Social with no ticks in Conventional nor Enterprising. Apparently Architects are supposed to fall in the Artistic-Realistic camp, so I guess I came close to my “category”, especially since I managed to completely avoid the Enterprising group. The Investigative and Social parts came from the problem solving and the coordination work I’ve needed to do as part of my job, especially while currently while doing Construction Administration. Which unfortunately also involve a lot of “Conventional” due to the mass of paperwork that comes with building a building.
I enjoy the CA process in that its a series of problem solving. And I don’t mind a little bit of filing to keep everything orderly, but I have noticed that when I am forced to just do a lot of paper-crunching I get very antsy. So maybe there is some validity to all this.
Or maybe its just a matter of a personality test that lets you see yourself as you want to be seen.