All sophomores answered a series of questions as part of the online Murphy-Meisgeier Type Indicator for Children, a condensed personality inventory based on the Myers-Briggs indicator, last week to discover different aspects of their personality and in what environments they thrive.

“The sophomore year is all about getting to know themselves,” Dean Vanna Cairns said. “Before we launch into talking about colleges, we want to see what is the best fit for the students and what type of atmosphere would pull out the best in them intellectually.”

The results will describe specific tendencies of the students’ personalities by providing them with one letter in four categories: Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I), Sensing (S) or Intuition (N), Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), Judging (J) or Perceiving (P). This information, however, will not be immediately shared with the students.

In the next few weeks, sophomores will participate in a series of four activities designed by the MMTIC publishers during consecutive class meetings to demonstrate their personality tendencies in each of the categories. After the activities, the students will be able to see the results from the MMTIC and compare them to those of the activities.

In the past, the personality traits determined by the MMTIC have generally matched very well with the results of the verifying activities, Cairns said.

“What’s amazing to me is that this 15- to 20- minute inventory is surprisingly accurate,” Cairns said. “There is something about it that really does get at what each student’s preferences are.”