It wasn't all that surprising of a result. I asked some friends to take it, and most of my math-y friends were also fellow INTJ's. I had some fun with family and friends---we tried taking it for each other to see how closely the results would match, we tried taking it for random mutual friends, etc. It was, all in all, quite entertaining.
Now for a slight tangent: In the last few months, I have spent a very large majority of my time doing math. This is quite different from the way I have partitioned my time in the past. In high school and in earlier years of university, I have spent my time doing math, writing, practicing violin, and being social in (relatively) equal proportions. Over the last few months of being here in Budapest, I have found myself becoming less and less social---I easily get tired when hanging out with friends, I find the comfort of staying within the walls of my apartment alone preferable to almost any other environment, and I have found that I am becoming increasingly reserved in my interactions with other people. So I wondered: Was the increase of math in my daily life somehow connected to my decrease in sociableness? Had I changed from the experience of spending most of my time doing math? Chances are I probably have changed, though it is certainly too soon to reflect on this issue in a semi-objective way. And so I decided to take the Myers-Briggs test again (the same one I took eight months ago). The result?
The results confirmed my suspicion. Comparing the two results, the Intuitive, Thinking, and Judging (NTJ) areas have stayed nearly exactly the same. But in the first letter, the Introverted/Extroverted measurement, my score jumped from a previous 22% preferred I to 78%. ^^;;;;; <-- sweat marks...
There are, of course, probably dozens and dozens of reasons that contribute to this drastic shift towards introversion, but for fun, I'm going to try to think of a few.
I haven't been back at Stanford since... June. And it's killing me. I miss it so much. And yet. I am here. In Budapest. And I won't even be back there next quarter. I didn't expect it to be this hard to be away for this long... I thought I'd just go to Boston for the summer, go to Budapest for the Fall, go to Oxford for the Winter, and then I'd be back. Not too long, in the grand scheme of things, and everything would go on smoothly and happily. La-dee-dah. But. To miss is a hard thing to feel, and I think it really weighs down on you inside, and I miss a lot of things. The main thing is the people. I miss my friends there. I miss the professors there. I miss the whole environment.
I mentioned the math thing... And another thing is that here, I have a lot fewer hours of class time than I usually do back at my dear home school. This is great because I have a lot of time to just study and read and work on my own, which I really like. But on the other hand, this also means that I spend a lot more time just thinking and not worrying about things outside my head than I used to. Some people are gifted with the ability to be productive around other people. I am not one of those people. I find it extremely hard to concentrate when there are people around me, when there are noises around me, when there is anything but some sort of eerily intense library environment. I guess I just get distracted really easily... So I guess what all of this says, is that I've had a lot of time this semester to be alone, and I think I am becoming increasingly attached to that feeling.
As a side effect of the increase in math in my life, I have had significantly less time to write. In previous terms, I have taken at least one English class alongside my math classes, and I think it has made a bit of a difference. When I write, I find that I pay a lot more attention to what is going on in the world. Last year, when I did NaNoWriMo, I felt like I became hyper-aware of the way people interacted with each other, the way people moved, the way people expressed themselves, the way people were people. But when I'm thinking about math, my thoughts are very self-centered. I'll go on walks around Budapest, but my thoughts are almost completely inwardly focused. I'm thinking about math. And only every once in a while will I actually look up and realize, "Whoa! I'm in Budapest!"
I think that the very concept of living in a different country has also made me more introverted. In my fear of getting myself into a situation where I need but cannot communicate with someone, I try to keep my interactions with the Hungarian world to a minimum. I realize that this is not necessarily what one usually does when one goes abroad, and so in recent times, I have tried to broaden my horizons and go out on walks and stuff more often. But I have found that even though my physical exposure to Budapest has increased with my adoption of this habit, I am still very much in my own world when I am out there walking on the streets or in the mall or in the park.
I don't really know where I'm going here, but I just wanted to type out some stuff, and maybe try to help myself better understand how I have changed or how I am changing or what the effects of my experiences are in general. Since my arrival at BSM, I have felt the pressure to "correctly" decide how to split my time between work and play. Back at school, I almost never had this issue. I would work when I worked and play when I played, and that was the end of the matter. But here, I am constantly pressured by others to socialize more, I am criticized for spending too much time studying, and I feel like there is suddenly a lot of weight and a lot of consequences to my decision one way or another. Perhaps they are right, but I think it's a very personal decision. People are here for different reasons. They study for different reasons. They travel for different reasons. I don't know exactly why I'm studying abroad, but I do know (or at least I think I know) that I would rather regret not traveling enough than not studying enough.
And so it is that over the last eight months, I have become significantly more introverted, or "anti-social" as some would say. Maybe this is a temporary change. Maybe it's a permanent one. Only time will tell.
In less emotionally dramatic news, I'm going to Prague this weekend! Because of the unfortunate timing with a 24-hour flue a couple weeks ago that caused me to miss going to Transylvania, this will only be my second trip away from Budapest this semester (the first being Sarajevo). I'm quite excited, though the overnight train there and back doesn't sound terribly fun. In any case! I'll have pictures in a few days!
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