Your vocation decided for you?

Personally speaking, I try and understand everybody, try to analyze everybody to understand their strengths and weaknesses. I try to understand, and consequently predict how someone would react to a particular situation. I try to analyze and predict how loyal of a friend someone can be, what the priorities of someone are and to what extent they are willing to act on their principles.

This is, in effect, what we call the personality of people. People are born with certain inherent traits, either via DNA or through a mechanism (religious or otherwise) which I do not claim to understand. What I do claim is that majority of an individual's personality is decided by his environment - an individual's family, home environment, experiences and friends to name a few. Intuitively, we also know that an individual's personality is most malleable at a young age and becomes more rigid and fixed as he/ she grows older. Therefore at the tender ages 12-18, an individual has been molded as per the 'culture' or the environment he/ she has been raised in.

There is something called the Myers-Briggs test which classifies a personality into a specific type consisting of 4 traits. For the sake of simplicity, I will not go into details of the test, but suffice to say these tests offer a specific personality ytpe/ or atmost two personality types for a particular individuals. The test also then doles out a list of ideal professions for an individual based on the classification of their personality type. Whether the list is accurate or not, what we can agree on is that there is an ideal set of pressions for a particular type of personality.

Now this means that an individual's vocation and consequently college degree is then decided at the ages of 12-18 not by that individual himself/ herself but by circumstances surrounding the individual. Therefore there is very little choice for the individual to decide the vocation since his/ her personality has been shaped for the majority by circumstances.

Obviously this person did not have much choice about what sort of family/ environment to be born into and therefore here comes the quintessential question: The choice of vocation, the college degree then no longer becomes a matter of free will... does it?