The program you choose in the university will considerably influence your career and your life style in the future . After working several years, some people start to question their career choice and ultimately change their job, or painfully stay the job they do not like. Some students even just graduate and are already reluctant to work in the field of his major. Although a variety of reasons cause these problems, initial unwise choice of program is an important factor.

Before you select a program for yourself, you need ask yourself several questions: What kind of job you want? What are you looking for in the career? What kind of life you want? What are you interests? What is your personality? What is your strength and weakness?

If you currently can not answer these questions, you really need to take some time to do a self assessment.

What is self-assessment? From a personal perspective, self assessment is the process of gathering information about your personality, interests, weakness and strengths, and your value.(As of the definition in the organizational and educational settings, please refer to Wikipedia Definition of self-assessment)

It will not only help you determine which university program matches your interests and personality, but also give you chance to know yourself so that you will feel more confident on choosing a career which could be best fit for you.

Categories of self-assessment:

Personality assessment: evaluate your individual traits, motivational drives, needs, and attitudes and categorize into different types.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(MBTI) is possibly the most famous one, but not free.It defines 16 types of personality and indicates "all types are equal".
Keirsey Temperament Sorter -- a short initial report is free (registration required).

Our Profiler™ explores 3 realms of functioning: thinking/working/emoting. Each realm has 56 perception statements. Take your time. Rank each statement according to how well it describes you. Be honest. This is not a test. It is self-discovery.

Other Free assessment
http://similarminds.com/- a comprehensive collection of all kinds of personality assessment;
http://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/test.php
http://www.9types.com/writeup/enneagram.html#intro- a introduction about what Enneagram is;
http://www.9types.com/newtest/homepage.actual.html
https://www.testingroom.com/logon.jsp- free online test (need register);

Value assessment help you find what motivate you and what is important to you.

Soul survival career-intelligence.com (free guidance offered)

Interests assessment helps you find what really attract you and match your interests with your occupation.
a work interests quiz by Myfuture.com
http://www.myfuture.com/toolbox/workinterest.html
Campbell Interest and Skill Survey (CISS): available for a fee through http://assessments.ncspearson.com/assessments/tests/ciss.htm and ww.usnews.com/usnews/edu/careers/ccciss.htm.
Self-Directed Search: www.self-directed-search.com.
CareerKey: www.careerkey.org.

Career assessmenthelps you find out which kinds of careers are suitable for you.

Princeton online career Quiz
http://www.princetonreview.com/cte/quiz/career_quiz1.asp

Monster Quizzes and tools
http://assessment.monster.ca/
School finder(Canada)
http://www.schoolfinder.com/careers/3step1.asp

Skills assessment

Online interests and skills assessment
https://www.profiler.com/cgi-bin/ciss/moreform.pl?client=ncs&page=intro

Tips for Self-assessment:

• The better way to do self-assessment is to assess yourself without input from a counselor.
• Because these assessments are tools not tests. there is no right or wrong answer. You should realize that these answers only give you guidelines for your self-discovery and career, but not hard and fast answer about yourself and what you should do. It is not the golden rule.
• When you did same assessment with different reason, you could be get different results.

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• You don’t need to do several assessments except you really think the result is too much different from what you think. Otherwise, the results from different assessments will confuse you.
• Assessment results will help you narrow your choices, not replace you to answer which one is the best.
• People usually change their value and interests during his life, even his personality. Therefore, this kind of self-assessment is not done once and for ever. At various stages of life, You need to redo self-assessment to check if any change has happened and ask yourself if what I do is still what I want.

You have to bear in mind the only thing constant is change.

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