I recall one of my professors asking me what I was doing (t)here. He was positive that I should have been in the MBA program and not the PhD program. Because my entire mien did not fit the (read: his) definition of a chemical engineer.

While it was true that I was never one to be put into a square box, I always knew I was going to be a chemical engineer. Sure, to mimic a commercial playing (droning?) on the TV, I definitely was not going to be your father’s chemical engineer.

And, now, my concept of Chem E is becoming the norm. Of course, today is 40+ years later. But, like many of the processes and products I’ve developed over the past half-century, I’ve often been a decade or two or three before my time.

However, my professor was on to something. There definitely is a personality type associated with a slew of majors. Dr. Anna Vedel of Aarhus University (Denmark) has examined (this publication was based upon her doctoral research) what turns out to be the psychological profiles of some 13, 389 students (she culled the data from 12 research papers) to determine this conclusion. And, the reason she chose this research was she felt too many people only classified students and professions by whether the folks were introverted or extroverted. Vedel (and her advisor, Dr. Lars Larsen) wanted to broaden the analysis.

Vedel’s paper, Big Five personality group differences across academic majors: A systematic review, will be published this April (2016) in the journal entitled Personality and Individual Differences. (I promise- I didn’t make up this journal title!) Vedel employed the “Five Factor” model developed by Drs. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, the leading researchers into personality types.

The 12 research studies (the ones she reviewed) were published over the past 13 years, from 1992 to 2015. Her contribution was aggregating their results, since these studies employed different methodologies and had different numbers of students in their evaluations.

Vedel defined the “big five” personality traits as openness, conscientiousness, extroversion,  agreeableness, and neuroticism . (Costa-McCrae term these the OCEAN of personality.) Thankfully she also defined the salient features by which she grouped these students. Extroversion means the students were more assertive and sociable. The creative types, the ones with manifold interests comprised the openness “pigeonhole”. Not surprisingly, agreeability meant that one was trusting and altruistic. If the student seems moody, irritable, or perhaps emotionally unstable, she termed them neurotic. And, those students who were goal oriented and rarely impulsive were termed conscientious.

One of the most common traits she found manifested in those majoring in the Arts and Humanities was “openness”- and also neuroticism! (Don’t worry, psychology majors were also in the neurotic pigeonhole.) “Extroverts” were mostly found in the fields of economics, law, political science, and pre-med. Those majoring in science were not likely to be extroverts (Score one for my professor) nor creatives (man, he was on a roll).

Bet you’d NEVER guess that law, business, and economics majors scored consistently low on the agreeableness scale. Or, that arts and humanities were clutching the bottom of the conscientiousness scales.

Vedel also managed to answer the question of whether the students started out that way or were molded into those personality types. (Hmm. I thought only engineering departments worked hard to get their students into those little square boxes.) While there were only two studies upon which she could rely, she averred that these personalities were pre-existing; they may have become better honed, but they clearly manifested these traits before they chose their majors.

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