Chap Num= 7 Id= Ch

<FM<TTL>The College Experience Today</TTL>

<SUBTTL>Whether Fifteen or Fifty, Traditional or Nontraditional, College Is for Everyone</SUBTTL</FM>

<BOX NUM="1" TY="BX1" ID="BX1.07.001"<SUPTTL<INST>BOX7.1

</INST>Scenario</SUPTTL>

<TTL>Our Multicultural Differences in Communication</TTL>

<INSTR<P>As the students file into the classroom, Professor Weitzman is writing the following question on the blackboard: <ITAL>Who do you have difficulty communicating with?</ITAL</P</INSTR>

<DLG<SPKR>Professor Weitzman:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>For starters on today’s topic, interpersonal communications, I’m asking for volunteers to respond to the question I’ve written on the board.</P>

<SPKR>Jill Smith:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>I’ll start. I find it very hard to have a friendly discussion with my mother. Every time I visit her, she starts in criticizing everything I am wearing. I get back to my own apartment and I’m utterly ashamed of myself. It only takes 10 minutes and we’re bickering!</P>

<SPKR>Alec:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>Ten minutes! What’s your secret! I can’t talk to my father for two minutes without us getting into the same old arguments. I know what’s coming! He wants to know what crazy new-fangled idea I’ve learned at school! “Filling your head with all that liberal trash!” I can’t stand that man!</P>

<SPKR>Eduardo:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>Gosh, Professor. I don’t find it hard to talk with my family at all. They are always eager to listen to me and find out what I’m learning in school.</P>

<SPKR>Li Ho:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>I feel a little like Eduardo except for one thing. My Japanese family is holding on to a lot of their traditions. They think I’ve become too “Americanized.” Don’t get me wrong. I love some of their traditions. But when I bring home a Haoli girl who’s used to speaking up, they’re too polite to say anything but I know they think she is too forward. They want me to bring home nice Japanese girls who are respectful toward their elders and keep quiet.</P>

<SPKR>Jill Smith:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>They should only speak when spoken to?</P>

<SPKR>Li Ho:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>Not quite that bad. My family has been living in Hawaii for three generations. Once, though, my family went back to Japan to visit the relatives. I was just a teenager and was used to talking up in school. My father gave me a stern dressing-down once when I talked up without being addressed. That was kind of a shocker. I loved Japan but I was glad to get back to Hawaii.</P>

<SPKR>Martha:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>Tell me how to communicate with my mother-in-law. We have to go to dinner there every other Sunday, kids and all. (The in-between Sundays we go to my parents.) Everything is so polite and stilted and, of course, that’s just when the kids start acting up. Dinners at my parents’ house are much different. Rod says it’s so chaotic and noisy he can’t hear himself think. And it’s true. There are usually ten or twelve people for dinner and we argue about everything under the sun. Wow! Talk about not understanding another culture right here in this country (<ITAL>class laughter</ITAL>).</P>

<SPKR>Professor Weitzman:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>How about you, Dan? We haven’t heard from you for quite some time now.</P>

<SPKR>Dan:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>Native American’s don’t do as much talking as the rest of you. It’s not like what Li Ho was describing—a matter of respect. I mean we do respect the Elders and all that but it really has more to do with not speaking unless you have something important to say. It’s just part of us.</P>

<SPKR>Shannon:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>I talk with my dad and brothers OK and we get along fine, but outside of my family, I’m so shy I can hardly talk sometimes. Sometimes people think I’m just dumb.</P>

<SPKR>Natasha:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>I would like to say that at home we get along OK. Sometimes Georgie gets a little . . . I think the word is maybe irrr . . . irr . . . ?</P>

<SPKR>Professor Weitzman:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>Irritable?</P>

<SPKR>Natasha:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>Yes, irritable, but I understand that. We have no family here but ourselves. He was very much important in the old country because he was auto mechanic—very good. People have much respect for him. Here he is only custodian at the school. He hurts inside.</P>

<SPKR>Professor Weitzman:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>Very understandable.</P>

<SPKR>Jennimae:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>I used to have wonderful communication with my kids. Now they are teenagers and we are always at each other’s throats.</P>

<SPKR>Professor Weitzman:<INST</INST</SPKR<P>Communicating with those closest to us, the people in our family, can be the most difficult type of interpersonal communication of all. We may both be psychologists, but occasionally my wife and I can get into it pretty hot and heavy. What we have going for us though is our determination to resolve the situation for both of us. That doesn’t happen overnight. It may take a day or two, or even longer.</P</DLG</BOX>

<BM<H1>What It Means To Be a College Student Today</H1>

<P>College<BOXIND NUM="1" ID="BX1.07.001"/> was once considered a <BOLD>moratorium</BOLD> (time out) between graduation from high school and taking on adult responsibilities for the economic and social elite (Erikson, 1950). In the years before World War II, college was modeled after the great universities of Europe, which were intended for the affluent and social elite. There were very few scholarships and even fewer opportunities to earn money while attending classes for those who were not financially supported by their families. Consequently, the student populations of prestigious colleges (for example, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for the men, and Radcliffe and Bryn Mawr for the women) came from the upper social classes; namely, the dominant cultural group of that era; the White Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite. In those days, college wasn’t exactly a playground, but it was the era when the Greek fraternity and sorority dances were at their apex, where young men and women could meet the opposite gender, and choose an acceptable life mate of their own social class (see Tip 7.1[1]<FNIND NUMBER="1"/>). In this socially stratified higher educational situation, the college experience was viewed as a “lock-step” four-year program. Students right out of high school were expected to finish their four-year undergraduate education exactly in “lock-step” with all those they began with as freshmen. If a student dropped out or somehow failed to get a degree in the four-year time period, it wasn’t exactly a failure, but it was something a little bit dishonorable.</P>

<P>World War II and all the sweeping social transformations that have gone on since then have radically changed the philosophy of higher education. Today, college is no longer considered a moratorium for the economic and social elite. Nor do we hold the “lock-step” four-year model of education as valid for today’s generation of students. What changed the philosophy of higher education was the return of World War II veterans. For the first time in history, the United States made available to its 11 million returning veterans a wide offering of benefits, known as the G.I. Bill. One of these benefits was money for some kind of schooling. Millions of the ex-GIs registered for college. These veterans were rarely from the social elite. In fact, they came from every segment of society. War-weary and anxious to make a better life for themselves, the veterans were not at all interested in pledging to Greek fraternities or working on floats at the homecoming game. Many of these veterans were already in their late twenties and early thirties and their motivation for college was to get good jobs.</P>

<P>In addition to their studies, most of them had adult responsibilities. The financial aid they were getting did provide for their tuition and books with some money for living expenses, but with families to support the veterans also had to work at part- or full-time jobs. Sometimes they had to take fewer classes because of the requirements of their work or even drop out for a term or two before completing their degree. The four-year “lock-step” tradition was forever broken. Colleges and universities all over America changed their educational philosophy to adapt to this new breed of students.</P>

<H2>Today: A Multivariate Approach to Education to Fit Our Multicultural College Population</H2>

<P>Today, college administrations encourage students to complete their degrees any way they can, by taking fewer classes if they need to, or by dropping out and back in when they are able. Colleges also made it possible for students who hold full-time day jobs to attend classes in the evening and on weekends, a situation almost unheard of before WW II. Today there is a multivariate approach to education to meet the needs of our multicultural college population. Students are being offered an ever wider menu of educational opportunities, such as miniterms, 45 semester-hour courses over an extended four-day weekend, and even full-time courses online. Moreover, whether we are technicians or professionals, most careers require us to keep updated through further on-site training, taking more classes, attending workshops and conferences, and so on. We now consider education as a life-long process (Maehl, 1997). Today men and women of all ages are returning to school whether single or married, fresh out of high school or after some years of working. College no longer suffers from agism.</P>

<P>Nor is the student population restricted to any one dominant cultural group. College students today reflect a wide diversity of ethnic background and financial status. Multicultural diversity has become the educational theme across the nation. Some of you may be just out of high school but are having to work in addition to going to school. Some of you have been out there “in the real world” working for a few years, and now are back to earn more marketable credentials. Some of you have had to wait until your kids were of an age when you felt you finally could get that education you always longed for. So whether you are 15 or 50, whether you are single, married, divorced or remarried, you will find something of value in this chapter on how to make friends, how to maintain friendships, and how to repair broken friendship ties. In this chapter too, we discuss such topics as how to meet other people, how people become attracted to each other, romance and love, and what happens when a long-term relationship dissolves. In the next chapter, we discuss the topics of marriage and children, infidelity and what happens when it is discovered, divorce, and reintegrating oneself in society. Whoever you are and whatever diversity you represent, this chapter and the next are focused on helping you discover more about who you are and how to establish more rewarding interpersonal relationships.</P>

<H1>Your Personality “Type”</H1>

<H3>Learning More about Your Personal Identity.<INST</INST</H3<P>To start us off on this topic of developing rewarding interpersonal relations, we invite you to take a personality “Type” inventory that tells you something about yourself. Students report that it is fun to take and easy to score themselves. You don’t have to worry about what you may discover about yourself as none of the traits have anything to do with being abnormal or with having “good” or “bad” personalities, any more than it is “good” or “bad” to have brown eyes, blue eyes, or green eyes. Then we’ll apply what you have discovered about yourself to your friendship needs and how to interact with other people according to their personality “Type.”</P>

<P>“Type” psychology is based on the work of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, and two Americans, Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs (Jung, 1955; Pearman & Fleenor, 1996). Type psychology is based on the assumption that we come into the world with different “types” of personality. It is not our environment that has determined our personality patterning but something innate and inborn. College students enjoy assessing themselves through this test because it does not stick you into an “abnormal” category. On the contrary, it provides you with some appreciation of your strengths and natural gifts. What it does also is to provide us with insight into people we have difficulty understanding because their personality “type” is so different from our own. Discovering the way others function naturally will enable us to communicate in ways that will have meaning for them. According to Type psychology, there are 16 basic personality types consisting of four dimensions:

<UL<ITEM<P>Extroversion-Introversion (E-I)</P</ITEM>

<ITEM<P>Sensing-Intuition (S-N) (Since the letter “I” is already used for Introversion, “N” is used for Intuition.)</P</ITEM>

<ITEM<P>Thinking-Feeling (T-F)</P</ITEM>

<ITEM<P>Judging-Perceiving (J-P)</P</ITEM</UL>

It is important to remember that we all have some measure of these eight functions or we couldn’t survive. But generally speaking, we favor one function or the other. You may already know which side of these four dimensions defines you best. If not, check out the descriptions in <LINK LINKEND="BX1.07.002">Box<BOXIND NUM="2" ID="BX1.07.002"/>7.2</LINK> to get an idea of your personality “type.” Even though we usually are dominant on one side or the other on the four dimensions, it may be that you find yourself exhibiting a little bit of both sides. In that case, accept whatever seems to be true of you, but in any case, accept only what you think is true of you.</P>

<H3>The Extroversion-Introversion Dimension.<INST</INST</H3<P>Most Americans are familiar now with this first dimension—our orientation in the world and where we get our energy from. <BOLD>Extroverts</BOLD> are turned toward society. They get their energy from other people. They find delight in social situations and enjoy people-related tasks. Because they are interested in others, they make delightful hosts, friendly companions, and good committee chairs. Generally speaking, they are adaptable and affable and can get people to work together on projects and tasks with comparative ease. That is why they make such good managers. They can make good counselors and grade school teachers because they like people. However, they have a desire to be liked, so they may pursue popularity and adopt whatever fads are going around. They may vote for government officials, not because they have truly examined the issues, but because they want to join “the band wagon.”</P>

<BOX NUM="2" TY="BX1" ID="BX1.07.002"<SUPTTL<INST>BOX7.2

</INST>Self-Exploration</SUPTTL>

<TTL>Which Personality “Type” Are You?</TTL>

<INSTR<P<ITAL>Read each pair of statements for each dimension. Mark the box that is more true of you. Then add up the marked boxes under each dimension. Example: If you have seven boxes marked under Extroverts and three boxes under Introverts, put an E in the first of the four boxes at the end of the self-exploration box. Do the same for the other dimensions.</ITAL</P</INSTR>

<UNTBL<COLH2>Extroversion-Introversion Dimension</COLH2>
<COLHD>Extroverts / Introverts</COLHD>
<TB>Enjoy social events, “party animals.” /  / Prefer peaceful and quiet atmospheres. / 
Enjoy work teams even with a few incompetents. /  / Prefer working alone, especially if team has incompetents. / 
Good hosts who make people feel at home. /  / Trouble remembering names and faces of casual acquaintances. / 
Don’t mind interruptions by phone calls. /  / Dislike unexpected interruptions while working. / 
Need some social contact each day to feel good. /  / Need some private time each day “to think own thoughts.” / 
Have many friends and casual acquaintances. /  / Prefer a few intimate friends rather than many casual friends. / 
Communicate freely, often first to talk in class. /  / Prefer to keep thoughts private until feeling comfortable. / 
Like to hear what others think of movies, politics. /  / Trust own judgments over the judgments of others. / 
Not afraid of revealing inner ideas and feelings. /  / Prefer maintaining privacy as “nobody’s business.” / 
It’s 5:00 <SCAP>p.m.</SCAP> on Friday. What they would prefer to do is meet friends for a TGIF drink or meal. /  / It’s 5:00 <SCAP>p.m.</SCAP> on Friday. They look forward to going home, kicking off shoes, and having a drink while reading or watching TV. / </TB>
 / 
<COLH2>Thinking-Feeling Dimension</COLH2>
<COLHD>Thinkers / Feelers</COLHD>
<TB>Prefer cool logic to emotional arguments. /  / Prefer to evaluate situations on basis of their feelings. / 
Prefer to treat people fairly but firmly. /  / Prefer to treat people kindly. / 
May be accused of ignoring people’s feelings. /  / Often a “soft shoulder” for people to confide their problems. / 
Like organization and logical discussions. /  / Prefer harmony; dislike confrontation with others. / 
Concerned first about justice and principles. /  / More concerned for people than principles of justice. / 
Firm-minded and objective about others. /  / Empathetic toward others; accused of being a soft touch. / 
Prefer to discuss issues rather than people. /  / Prefer to discuss people rather than issues. / 
Able to reprimand or fire people when needed. /  / Dislike hurting others by reprimanding or firing them. / 
Dislike emotional scenes and arguments. /  / Prefer “gut” reactions to logical argument. / 
On trips and vacations, like to plan out ahead of time where they are going, where they will stay, and what they will be doing. /  / May have a general idea of where they would like to vacation, but prefer to be able to do something spontaneous from time to time and not be restricted to a definite schedule. / </TB>
 / 
<COLH2>Sensing-Feeling Dimension</COLH2>
<COLHD>Sensors / Intuitives</COLHD>
<TB>Prefer to stay rooted to reality and known facts. /  / Like to propose new ideas, even if ideas are “far out.” / 
Prefer the “tried and true” over risking new ideas. /  / Like to think about what “could be” rather than “what is.” / 
Patient with details; aim for “zero mistakes.” /  / Work in bursts of inspiration; then slack off for a time. / 
Firm footing in physical world of objects and tools. /  / Enjoy contemplating the universe; solving mysteries. / 
Highly practical; distrust inspiration and hunches. /  / Rely on inspiration, hunches, and sudden insights. / 
Rely on numbers, figures in decision making. /  / Ideas come so fast, they are not sure how they got them. / 
Good with names, faces, directions, maps. /  / Not attached to material objects; lose keys, glasses, etc. / 
Like to finish a job meticulously. /  / Prefer to “rough-in” ideas, let others finish job. / 
Think others sloppy on details. /  / Avoid nitty-gritty details; prefer working on “big picture.” / 
Enjoy learning new technological skills. /  / Insights can be brilliant, but may also be “crackpot” ideas. / 
They like to look their best when they step out of the house, even if just going to the store. /  / They care more about what they are doing than how they look when they are doing it. / </TB>
 / 
<COLH2>Judging-Perceiving Dimension</COLH2>
<COLHD>Judgers / Perceivers</COLHD>
<TB>Like to get a job done as quickly as possible. /  / Prefer to take time to plan a project before doing it. / 
Make decisions in an instant and act on them. /  / Prefer to mull over a decision from different perspectives. / 
Like fast action and plenty of it. /  / Prefer calm atmospheres to too many things going on. / 
On tests, finish quickly; among first to leave. /  / Don’t like to rush through tests; among the last to leave. / 
Dislike too much talk about job— “let’s just do it!” /  / Do not like to be pushed into making a quick decision. / 
Like to do something rather than nothing. /  / Tend to procrastinate on finalizing a project and turning it in. / 
Often told that they leap before they look. /  / Often told to make up their minds and do something. / 
Fast acting in an emergency. /  / Procrastinate so long, some decisions made by indecision. / 
Often finish jobs ahead of deadlines. /  / Finish projects at last minute; may stay up all night to do so. / 
Opinions of others made quickly. /  / Take time to form an opinion of others. / </TB</UNTBL>
 / 

<H2>Scoring:<INST</INST</H2<P<ITAL>Count each column of boxes below each dimension. Then mark the boxes below whether you are E or I, S or N, F or T, J or P. (Examples E S F P or I N T J)</ITAL</P>