The Four Types of Scientists

I took my first Myers-Briggs personality test in the seventh grade, on the one afternoon of the year my teacher had set aside for us to go ahead and choose a future fulfilling career already. We all sat down at a computer, answered a few hundred multiple-choice questions, and finally discovered which of the 16 types best fit our preferences.I’m an ISTJ. In the system’s jargon, that’s ‘Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Judging.’ In plain English, the type is often referred to as the inspectors, the truth-tellers, the ‘Just the facts, Ma’am‘s.My best-fit careers, the program told me, would be structured, analytic, number-crunching-type things. Then the dot-matrix printer spit out meatier descriptions of specific job possibilities, for this check in the jobs in metroplex. And for the next couple of years — despite the fact that it had little to do with my interests in chemistry, math or the piano — I really and truly thought of myself as a market researcher in-the-making. That’s right: someone who designs and analyzes surveys.Later on, when it became clear that this was not the right prescription, I decided that the Myers-Briggs was, at best, psychological nonsense, and at worst, a pernicious tool that is stifling our children’s hopes and dreams.Read more at...The Last Word on Nothing, July 2011.