Meet My Career Counselor
Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence
You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well.
An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly.
You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view.
A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary.
You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.
What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?
My friend, upon learning I had resigned and was applying to a firm known for its tough interview process, told me not to worry: "You always do well on interviews, anyway."
At the time I thought the unspoken implication was that while I do brilliantly at interviews, performance on the job itself is a different story. On some level I knew that was my innate sense of prickliness (read: insecurity) talking in my head. But as my first choice of career has shown me, being qualified and being great for a position are two different things.
After all, we don't expect people to get married after a couple of dates. So why do we expect people to choose jobs on the basis of one or two interviews? Why do we think that a few random conversations with the HR person, or the division manager, or your friend in the same job, will prepare us for the reality of a life doing something for at least 8 hours a day, at least 5 days a week?
We make our choices based on information from limited sources that is filtered and spin-doctored and polished when presented to us. After all, everyone exaggerates to their potential employers in their interviews because they want to get hired. So it makes sense that employers who are trying to recruit potential employees are also trying to ensare you in a carefully crafted web of vague promises about bonuses, incentives and overseas training.
If neoliberal economists refuse to learn that statistics can lie (and can in fact say different things to different people) then most fresh graduates don't want to accept that job descriptions and enticing offers from this or that firm may in fact mask a reality far removed from what we foolishly expected. So when we get to that plush office, come face-to-face with that cubicle, and confront the reality of paper-pushing, mind-numbing clerical work and exhausting hour-long conversations with irate, annoying clients/suppliers/liaisons/assistants/whoever trying to address a problem a person with a brain the size of an amoeba should've been able to handle alone, we retreat home on weekends in horror, kicking and scratching and screaming inside our heads to be let free.
The fact that an internet survey about our "Dominant Intelligence" can be as valid and relevant to our choice of career path as any other source of information is an indication of how many options we quarterlifers have, and how few the sources of advice that we can trust. Small wonder we're all quitting our jobs, ranting about working, NOT working, or fleeing back to the embrace of student life.