JULIA NEESON

An ENFP's Guide to Choosing a Major: 

Taking Care of Business 

 

Myer’s Briggs classifies the ENFP personality as enthusiastic, idealistic, and constantly generating new ideas- the quintessential seekers and dilettantes. From personal experience, I can attest that to be wired this way is nothing short of exhausting.  I constantly seek change, innovation, renewal, and challenges and feel a significant deficit in my heart if I’m not giving each day its due diligence.  I can’t remember a time I haven’t felt restless. This is one of the prominent reasons that picking an undergraduate major was such a daunting task; how does anybody choose just one?

 

Originally, I started off as a Communications major. I saw this, in my retrospectively very low knowledge of the college scene, as a nice umbrella that would allow me not to be tied to a single career path. After about a year, I decided I needed more variety in my coursework and added a literature double major. Being a book nerd is one of the only constant loves of my life, and the classes came easily. Around the end of my sophomore year, I was beginning to feel like I was coasting. ENFPs do not like to coast. I added a business minor to the mix in an attempt to try something completely new. Shockingly, I loved my accounting class.  More significantly, I liked learning something completely new and that did not come so easily to me. Naturally, I had to change my major to business. Being a Junior with over 80 hours, this was not feasible in the typical degree plan for a BBA. So instead, I decided to declare a BS in Business Administration with Minors in Literature and New Media Design. I had finally arrived at my ideal major; it had the challenge and completely new curriculum topics such as finance and supply chain, while allowing me to cultivate my natural skills of literature and design.  It offered new ideas while still being tailored to the skills I knew I could excel at.  Since switching, I have never doubted my major once- a seemingly impossible occurrence after two and a half years of second-guessing.

 

From this embarrassingly long chain of events, I’ve learned a lot about what is going to make me happy in my professional, academic, and personal life.  I like fluidity, and fear settling into something that doesn’t challenge me or force me to create new skills. This constant change most certainly seems flighty to the outside eye, and me an unsure person who doesn’t know what they want. For a while, I agreed. But feeling unsettled isn’t always a bad thing; it allows for growth. I have definitely grown throughout these past four years and, while I’m happy where I ended up, I wouldn’t have given up the process for anything.  Throughout each of the steps I met amazing professors who mentored me through those times, studied a variety of subjects that few can boast throughout their undergraduate career, and grew so much as a person. I learned that no matter how many times someone tells me what or how I should do something, I will always want to find out for myself and test all the options.

 

At the end of it all, I didn’t really have to choose one path- I chose many; something I see playing out in my future career as well. I want to have a job that is both challenging while playing to my strengths; something that is creative yet requires research, study, application, and growth. I love a challenge, and can’t see my restless personality giving that up anytime soon.