Explore Your Interests / Self Assessment

Identify your interests.

Interests run the range from a passing curiosity to something with consistent and lifelong appeal. Your interests can include your passions, hobbies, and curiosities. Your career can evolve to include the interests that you have not yet pursued as much as those to which you are already committed.

• Try this exercise ›

  Psychologist John Holland identified these six areas of occupational interest. Rank this list from the most to least descriptive of the patterns in your interests. When you’re done, send your responses to your email so you can bring them to your next advising appointment!

  ___ Realistic / Practical: enjoy practical and physical; engage with tools, machines, and gadgets ___ Investigative / Analytical: Enjoy gathering information and analysis; appreciates intellectual activities ___ Artistic / Creative: Enjoy aesthetics and self-expression; favor unstructured environments ___ Social / Connected: Enjoy helping, training, and counseling; thrive side-by-side with others ___ Enterprising / Influential: Enjoy persuasion and managing; prefer to lead ___ Conventional / Systematic: Enjoy details and accuracy; comfortable within a chain of command

  Input your email to have your response sent to your inbox:

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Assess your personality.

Your personality is unique to you and includes inherent traits as well as habits that you’ve acquired over time in realms like gathering information, making decisions, and relating to others. Better understanding characteristics of your personality can help you to articulate the circumstances under which you thrive, or natural strengths that you can utilize, regardless of your environment.

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  Describe yourself at your best and most natural in response to these prompts. When you’re done, send your responses to your email so you can bring them to your next advising appointment!

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  What energizes you?

  How do you gather information?

  What guides your decisions?

  What approaches do you use to conduct your life?

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Inventory your skills.

Your skills are the abilities that you possess. Skills are developed and improved with practice and over time, though they can be influenced by a natural knack or unique talent. Communicating your skills in a way that builds confidence requires that you give evidence of your past exposure and success.

• Try exercise 1 ›

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  Directions

  
  

  First, using the list below for inspiration, come up with ten skills that describe your current strengths.

  • • Communicating Clearly
  • • Managing a Project
  • • Collaborating towards a Goal
  • • Writing Persuasively
  • • Learning Quickly
  • • Researching Thoroughly
  • • Innovating
  • • Compiling a Budget
  • • Balancing Priorities

  My 10 Skills

  1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

  Next, come up with ten that describe those you expect will be important in your fields of interest. How do they compare? Note overlaps as well as gaps.

  10 Skills Important to My Field of Interest

  1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

  How do they compare? Note overlaps as well as gaps.

  Input your email to have your response sent to your inbox:

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• Try exercise 2 ›

  In making decisions about your career options, it is helpful to analyze what you know about yourself from past experiences. Think about what you have learned about your skill level and preferences of certain work components. These components could include broad soft skills like communication, working with others, and problem solving or specific work tasks that you would need to use in your area of interest such as technical skills or programs.

  *Remember it is easier to build a skill in an area versus trying to make yourself like something.

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  Directions

  Place the skills you use most in your work, classes, and other projects onto a chart like the one below. You can list skills in a section (for example, “these are the skills that I like to use and do well”). Or you can be more quantitative and place points for your skills at positions relative to how much you like to use them and how well you perform them.

  

  Reflection Questions

  Are the skills in the Do Well/Like category consistent with your interest areas?

  How will the Don’t Do Well/ Dislike category shape your search? Will you avoid these skills altogether?

  Or will you have to improve some of them in order to do work you like?

  Are the skills in the Do Well/Dislike category things that would make up the majority of your work in careers you’re interested in?

  What are ways you can improve the skills in the Don’t Do Well/Like category?

  Input your email to have your response sent to your inbox:

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