INTJ Personal Statement

When I was in elementary school, I had a monthly allowance of ten dollars. And I started helping my mother with some housework and she would pay me back every time I finished an assignment. In general, my mom would give me one dollar if I washed the dishes and two dollars if I helped her do the gardening. When I was in Junior high school, I worked for the student union for two years. My duties as a member of student union were making posters for school events and assisted with student executives. As for high school, I also worked the student Union for three years and I got a position as an officer of sports and recreational department. My mainly jobs were assisting with leading the organization in organizing school activities and coordinating recreational events for students. Although I were not being paid at these two student positions, it was a good

experience for me that it had developed my skills in communicating and cooperating with others. In my junior year at high school, several friends and I worked together to open an online store. We were targeting on students at our school since we were selling T-shirts that reflected our school cultures. The online store lasted for one year and each of us had made a great money from it. This experience means a lot to me. It was not only because it was the first time that I literally made money by myself, it was also the first time that I tried to learn how to do business, including marketing, promoting, and communicating with customers. After graduated from high school, I worked for a community service center for three months as an assistant officer. My daily jobs were assisting with providing community service for the elders, children, and the disabled people. And I was responsible for making schedules for community volunteers. It was the first payable job that I got and it was also the first time that I work off-campus with non-students so that it was a valuable experience for me. I have not received any part-time or full-time payable job since being in college, but I have volunteered for several events. For example, I volunteered for the annual CSU Southern California Hospitality Career Expo and I also volunteered twice for the CSULB Hospitality annual golf tournament. The experience in volunteering hospitality-related events had helped me to get myself involved in this industry and gaining customer service experience.
2. Assessments
Defining personality, interest, and values are very important for people to make their career decisions. Because different people have different personalities and interests, which will cause different preferences in job selections. People who works at a job that he or she is interested in tends to have more passions in performing their initiatives because interest acts as the best motivation.
According to my MBTI, my personal type is INTJ, which means that I am an introversive, intuitive, thinking, and judging person.

I prefer implementing ideas and achieving goals. I like seeing patterns quickly in external events and developing long-range explanatory perspectives. This type of person will organize a job and carry it through when committed. And I have high standards of competence and performance. The work value survey reveals that an experience change and variety at work, job security, high degree of excitement, friendships, artistic creativity expression, power and authority, are some of the working factors that I value. According to the self-direct search, my SDS code is CSA, which represents conventional, social, and artistic. I got the highest score in conventional that I am more interested in working indoors and organizing things by using clerical and math abilities. I also got great scores in artistic and social. It reveals that I prefer using my imagination and creativity at work. I also like to be around other people so that I prefer some jobs that can help, teach, or counsel other

people.
3. Career options
Among all the occupations that self-direct search recommended for me, I am interested in accounting clerk, customer service representatives, community health worker, and school counselor.
I am interested in accounting clerk (O*Net Code 43-3031.00) because I like working with information as well as following orderly routines. As an accounting clerk, it is able to getting information, interacting with computers and customers as well. It requires clerical, mathematics, and communication skills for this position. It also requires customer service ability since it has to meet the customer standards to create customer satisfaction. According to the occupational outlook handbook, the median pay for financial clerks in 2014 was $36,260 per year and the typical education level is high school diploma. It is suitable for me because my goal is to get a bachelor degree by the time I graduate from college.
Another similar position that I am interested in is customer service representative (O*Net Code 43-4051.00). A customer service representative needs to confer with customers by telephone or in person to provide information about products or services. Similar to accounting clerk, it also requires great clerical and communication skills. However, a consumer service representative needs to have certain sales skills when taking orders and processing payment. The salary of customer service representative is around $31,200 per year and generally high school diploma is required.
Community health worker (O*Net Code 21-1094.00) is another occupation that I am interested in. A community health worker is the person that assists individuals and communities to adopt healthy behaviors and provides social support. It is a social type occupation, which is helping other people rather than engage in mechanical or technical activities. I am interested in this job because I am looking forward to find a job that is helpful and meaningful. However, I decided to discard this job from my career options list because it requires medicine and dentistry skill to diagnose and treat human injuries, diseases, and deformities. Although the educational level required is college degree, I am lacking of professional medicine knowledge.
The last option that I am interested in is a school / guidance counselor (O*Net Code 21-1093.00). To be a school counselor, you have to have the knowledge in education, training, even psychology. I am interested in this position because it contains influencing other people as well as expressing creativity. However, like the community health worker, I decide to discard this option. This job is not currently suitable for me because the general educational level required for this job is master’s degree, while my current goal is getting a bachelor’s degree.
As a result, after analyzing four different career options by searching each of them in the O*Net database and the Occupations Outlook Handbook, I find myself more interested in accounting clerk and customer service representative. It is important and necessary to learn the descriptions of occupations so that you can determine whether this occupation satisfies your interests and value or not.
4. Informational interviews
Although I selected accounting clerk and customer service representative as my job preference, my major is Hospitality Management so that I am actually looking for related occupations in the hospitality industry. In this case, I interviewed two of my friends who has been working in the hospitality industry about their jobs.
Vy Nguyen, a 21-year-old full-time student at Cal State Long Beach majoring in hospitality management, has been working as a student staff at the on-campus Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden for 7 months. She was introduced to this job by one of her professors and she started to join their spring internship program. As a student staff, her daily works were assisting in planning events. The specific job assignments were depended on the type of the event and the season of the event. Her working hours were very flexible while she usually worked on the weekends from 3pm to 11pm. The working schedules were flexible that there were some weeks they were extremely busy while there were also some weeks that they did not have any events. In general, her job duties were setting equipment and getting ready for the events. During the events, she needed to greet guests and ask if they need any help. During the event, she also needed to be aware of any possible problems that would happen. When the event ended, she needed to break down all the equipment and put them away as well as cleaning up the garden. Vy likes her job at the Japanese garden because she enjoyed the working environment and atmosphere there. She worked very well with her coworkers as a team and she was enjoying gaining satisfaction from assisting holding a wedding or family events. As a hospitality person, she liked this job because she got a lot of chances to communicate with guests and be helpful to them. However, there were some aspects that she did not like about this job. For example, the insects and spiders around in the garden were annoying and she had been always scared about that. From her own experience, Vy thought that the essential ability for this job is to be cheerful and have good-attitude. She also indicated that she was looking forward to working for the Japanese garden again before she graduate from college. After that, she has to move on and look for another off-campus job to develop herself.
My another interviewee, Brenda Khieu, has been working for Starwood Hotels & Resort
the Sheraton Hotel as an accounting clerk for five years. She is also a full-time student at Cal State Long Beach majoring in Hospitality Management and this is her last year as an undergraduate student here. She usually works for three days a week from 8a.m to 5p.m. As an accounting clerk, her daily works include accounting payable/receivable, ensuring billing and invoices. Enduring deposit balance, supplying money for all department banks, and issuing banks or change requests. She also worked for preparing daily reports and assisting with customers billing and credit card issues. It was her responsibility to accurate accordance with accounting policies and procedures in a timely manner. She started her career in Sheraton Hotel as a front desk agent, and then she was transferred to the accounting department. There was an accounting training program offered before she starts this position and they also provided cross training. She was enjoying the opportunity of switching departments because it helped her have a better understand about the hotel operation. Since an accounting clerk has to handle multitasks, sometimes she would be struggling in the deadlines for different tasks. According to Brenda, some clerical skills, such as using excel and Microsoft, are necessary for an accounting clerk, however, a good attitude in learning works better. With this attitude, Brenda is looking forward to remaining as a loyal employee and moving to different locations if needed. She also sees herself to be in a leadership position in accounting within the next ten years.
Both of Vy and Brenda gave me clear descriptions about the specific jobs for an event planner and an accounting clerk, especially Brenda since the accounting clerk is one of my career options. Although they are in different positions and working on different types of jobs, both of them have indicated a very important point that a good attitude and a willingness to learn is significant for any kind of job.
5. College major
Because of my interest in customer service, I chose Hospitality Management as my undergraduate major. I determined Hospitality Management as my major at the beginning of my college career so that I have been implementing this decision during these two years in college by getting involved in class and attending hospitality-related events. And I am currently heading to the next step, which is finding relevant internships and other experience opportunities. To get prepared for the next step, I am currently working on practicing my interview skill and optimizing my resume as well as the cover letter. To further my progress in expanding the hospitality industry, I need to evaluate how well the decision is working for me. For example, I need to evaluate whether I would be able to apply my study to work activities and whether there were any potential opportunities for me.
6. Career Center Workshop
On April 14th, 2016, I attend an online workshop provided by the Career Development Center, called “Surfing for Internships”. During this workshop, the associate director, Erin Booth-Caro, the internship advisor, Mariela Gutierrez gave us a lot of useful information and resources about what is internships, why do we need an internship, and how can we find an internship. An internship is not only a job, it is also a training program that supervises you building network and gaining skills in the field you want to get into. It is a good opportunity to improve study skills and gain working experience at the same time. There are different types of internships, including payable internships and unpayable internships. The internships with non-profit organizations or government organizations are more likely to be unpaid. What surprised me in this workshop was that the current average hourly wage for an internship position is $17.20, which is much higher than the minimum wage.
The workshop also introduced several resources for searching internships. First of all, our career development center on campus is definitely is a good resource for student to explore their careers. Except for that, there are also many online resources with credible information, such as the O*Net database, hotel brand websites, and job fairs.
Since my next step in decision-making is looking for a relevant internship, this workshop was really helpful for me.
7. Academic and career success
In my opinion, the academic performance is highly related to the working performance. Academic success cannot lead to career success, however, academic success contributes to career success. It is not about grades, but the way we learn. In order to be successful in academic, we are training ourselves in terms of discovering our strengths, developing our learning skills, and having the right attitudes towards studying. And all of these gains are valuable for our working performance.
On the other hand, a person who makes academic success has to have enthusiasm and initiative in studying. Similarly, the person who has enthusiasm in his or her job position and eager to take initiative is the one who most likely to make career progress.
Overall, career decision is a long-term decision making progress. First of all we need to define our personal interests, personalities, values, and abilities. Secondly, we need to gather information about potential career options and determine our studying field. Last but not least, we need to modify our decision by evaluating both of our study performance and working performance.