Exercises for Thinking About College

Exercises for Thinking About College

Your Skills:

Make a chart of your recent activities and the skills involved:

Yesterday and Today

Activities	Skills Involved
French Homework	Memorization, writing, and speaking another language
Biology Lab Report	Observation, formulating hypothesis, testing with evidence
Cheerleader Practice	Physical coordination, balance and motion and cooperation with others.

Last Summer

Activities	Skills Involved
Camped in Colorado Mountains	Reading maps, building fires, cooking simple meals, observed nature, determined needs and packed supplies, persuaded parents to let me go.
Repaired/Upgraded family Stereo	Digital facility, knowledge of electrical circuits, and sound reproduction.
Learned to Sail	Elementary navigation, physics of wind and water, observation of weather and water patterns.

The Future

Activities	Skills Involved
Dismantle a jet engine	Knowledge of engineering, physics, digital facility, combustion, convection, air currents
Manage a Stock Fund	Understand economics, the stock market, securities analysis, interaction of market forces, government, international, regional, public opinion, take calculated risks.

Your Values:

To discover the role that values play in your life, how strongly you believe in some values and how uncertain you may be about others, conduct a Values Auction.

First consider the following list of values. Print it off if you wish. Be sure to add other values that may be important to you.

Health	Religion	Security
Family	Power	Marriage
Travel	Personal Recognition	Honesty
Love	Personal Autonomy	Friendship
Emotional Health	Good Appearance	Knowledge, Wisdom
Pleasure	Charity	Achievement

Next assume a budged of $1000 to spend on "purchasing" some or all of these values for $100 to $200 each. Now spend the money on the values on your list and see where it goes. What is really important to you? What is distinctly secondary?

Your Personality:

The third area of self assessment identifies your personality. Why type of person are you? What kind of working and learning environment suits you best? Socially, Intellectually?

Richard N. Bolles in his clever and helpful book What Color is Your Parachute? offers a model to consider. He asks you to imaging a party at which people with the same and similar interests are gathered in six different areas of the room. As a newcomer, you are asked to identify the group with which you feel the greatest affinity, the one you would most enjoy being with.

The Six Groups:

Group A: People With athletic or mechanical ability who prefer to work with objects, machines, tools, plants or animals, or to be outdoors.
Group B: People who have clerical or quantitative ability who like to work with data and like to carry things out in detail and follow through on others' instructions.
Group C: People who like to work with others, influencing, persuading, leading, or managing them as they seek to achieve organizational goals, particularly financial ones.
Group D: People who like to work with others, to inform, enlighten, train, develop, or cure them, or who are skilled with words.
Group E: People who have artistic, innovative, or intuitive abilities and like to work in unstructured situations using their imagination and creativity.
Group F: People who like to observe, learn, investigate, analyze, evaluate and solve problems.

Make a note of the group you would most like to join. Then imagine that the groups breaks up for some reason, and the members go home. What would be your next group of choice? And your third? Do your choices of groups reflect the personal values you identified in the last exercise? They should to a great degree? Can you make some connections between this exercise and trying to choose a college that is right for you?

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