Friday, October 14, 2011

Psychology in Real Life....?

I think that my Personality class is shaping up to be my favorite class. It is a very notes intensive course, but I didn't have to buy a textbook for it (which instantly makes a class sit better with me) and we actually have fun, creative, crafty projects to do in it. For example, when we were studying Freud and his stages of development, we were assigned to make a board game based off of his theories. And if you know anything about his theories, you should know that doing an internet search about any part of it will yield some very interesting results. But I digress.

Personality is very interesting just because of the topic of it. It's on the individual level of psychology, so everyone in the class has something to say about personality. Especially on this one day. We were finishing up the psychoanalytic theories of personality development (as described by Freud, Jung, and Horney) when Dr. Maluso (the professor) posed a very interesting question to the class "has your personality changed since coming to college?".

Going against what we had just learned about how one's personality is set during their childhood, most of the class said yes that their personalities had change since they started college. One answer stuck with me the most. He said that he became 'freedom happy because [he] realized that [he] could do whatever'. A lot of people agreed with that-- both in good and bad terms. Freedom happy means that you could stay up as late as you wanted, without anyone telling you to go to bed. But on the opposite of that, no one is around to make sure that you get up in the morning to go to class. A lot of everyone's answers were along that vein- that their personalities did change when they went away to school. What I found quite interesting though is that a common thread was after being freedom happy, they were able to find a maturity within themselves that balanced out their love of freedom with the fact that they still had responsibilities that needed to be done.

Then I got to thinking about myself. Has my personality changed since being at school? Unlike almost of my class, I don't think my has. My junior and senior years off high school were much different than what you typically think of occurring. I worked a minimum of twenty hours per week during the school year, on top of being in 3 honors and AP classes both years. Plus I was also in National Honor Society and National Foreign Language Honor Society, and spearhead projects each year for both of those societies.

I guess that's pretty normal for most students here at EC, having a lot of extracurricular responsibilities. But the difference lies in the fact that I had a lot of responsibility at home too. For reasons I prefer not to disclose my junior and senior years of high school and even into my freshman year of college were tough on my mother. She got through them, thankfully, and is now better then ever, but she will be the first to admit that those years were tough on me as well. As a result, I had to mature earlier than most of my class, as well as a develop a drive that is still with me now.

I guess the reason I have been thinking on whether my personality has changed is because I'm seeing my younger cousins go off to school now. While making me feel old, it also makes me happy. One has just started their freshman year at Sacred Heart University, and the other is in the process of applying early decision to Virgina Tech. I feel like this is a missive to let them know that they need to do their best, no matter what gets in their way. 

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