Weekly Reflection #6: October 6, 2016

            After completing the FOCUS 2 Work Interest assessment, my Holland Code was ICR, which stands for investigative, conventional, and realistic.  Investigative people are said to be “the thinkers,” conventional people “the organizers,” and realistic “the doers.”  After looking at the three categories that were my lowest scores, I definitely agree with my Holland Code.  Investigative was my area with the highest score.  Investigative people are supposed to enjoy solving puzzles, analyzing data, and working independently with little supervision, all of which I enjoy.  This past summer, my family went on a week-long vacation to the beach.  While we were there, we brought a huge puzzle and opened it up on the kitchen table.  Most people while at the beach wouldn’t even think of solving a puzzle, but this giant puzzle only took my family and me one week to complete.  I had a lot of fun doing this, and was surprised that I had so much fun completing a puzzle while at the beach.  Investigative people also enjoy analyzing data and working with charts and graphs, which both relate to math.  Math has always been my best subject, because it is straight forward and factual.  In subjects such as English, a big portion of your performance in the class relies on interpretation of the statements of others.  This has always confused me, because I don’t think that a student should be tested based on their ability to interpret opinion.  This is why I have enjoyed and succeeded in the math fields, because they require straight-forward answers with no leniency.  My senior year of high school, I took a math class that I wasn’t even required to take, just because I enjoy learning about math. As far as working independently, I cannot think of a specific instance where this was evident, however, every group assignment that I was given in high school was completed almost solely by me.  This caused me to despise group activities because it meant I had to rely on others, while I would much rather do a project on my own.    Conventional and Realistic were my next two highest scores, and they both essentially have the same description as the Investigative category.  People in these categories are very factual and prefer to work with data and records.  When looking at my examples listed for the investigative group, you can see that the descriptions of conventional and realistic people matches my experiences as well.  Looking at the results of my Personality assessment, my results showed that I am practical, responsible, thorough, orderly, and sensible.  I think that this personality description matches my Holland code, as every aspect of my personality results are required for someone who is informative, realistic, and conventional.  Someone who likes to work alone like I do must be responsible, sensible, and orderly because you have nobody to rely on to keep you in check.  Many of my experiences listed would put me in a job family relating to either business or engineering, both of which I’m considering as a potential career, and the FOCUS 2 assessment has given me a chance to think about these careers.