Hello.

I am Isaac Bowen, and it is my job to introduce myself, as long as you are all held captive for the next five minutes. Because this could get out of hand fairly easily, I’m going to divide this up a couple times, beginning with a standardized personality test. From there I’ll touch on my quantified (x, y and z), further divided into a brief summary of my personal and professional life. I’ll then briefly move into the more abstract characteristics of my very being, but only briefly as that sort of thing can get needlessly existentialistic.

Introductory psychology courses will inevitably force several personality tests down the student’s throat. This is convenient for introductory communications courses.

Carl Jung, that crazy, crazy man, had a few ideas concerning how personality was structured. According to the test based on his ideas, my personality type is INTP, colloquially known as that of the architect. “Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 3.3% of the total population.”

introspectives.org, which is slightly less well known than the honorable Carl Jung, classifies me as exactly 74% introverted. More articulately, I am avoidant, often late, rarely prepared, non-aggressive, but slow to judge others and patient, which are probably the least damaging traits assigned to me. … Take what you can get.

As long as I’m covering the arguably factual, let me backtrack and give you an idea of what my history looks like, beginning with my entire personal life, condensed into two points.

I come from a Christian household, a family a seven. Seven is also the number of pets I have gone through, including rabbits, a couple of needlessly aggressive birds, and a fairly large assortment of hermit crabs. They are all dead, including the hermit crabs, all for entirely different reasons.

I’ve lived in north-central Wisconsin for most of my life, and now live in a charming little alcohol-ridden locale called Rhinelander, which currently holds the Guinness record for most bars per capita. We are so proud.

Professionally, I am a freelance web developer, and have been moving from internships to contract projects to personal endeavors for some time now. I am currently working as a technical analyst for Heck Capital Advisors, a financial investment firm, and as a barista at the campus cafe. Coffee equals love. That is all.

And these are all things one might find on a resume; reasonably informative, but perhaps the intangible qualities are more interesting. My personality and life history are more or less split down two lines: intellectual and creative. I have a very strong drive in both directions. Hammering code, musing on the nature of metaphysical dimensional reality, these are not boring things. Neither is sitting down at a piano for an hour or so to just make music.

These two often separate tendencies largely define who I am as a person and how I think, what I do. Most pertinently, this is why I am a web developer/designer. As a developer, the intellectual tendencies are satisfied with building and coding functional systems. As a designer, I can create and arrange, add visual nuance, make things that catch and engage the eye.

To conclude – everything is still in progress. Rather than an introduction to who Isaac Bowen is today, I consider this to be more of a status report, if you will. An update on how much progress (or regression) has been made thus far. My short-term foreseeable future is more or less set – school here for a couple years, then probably a few years of freelancing. Possibly a “real” job somewhere.

Or perhaps not. Things are still changing, and there will always be much to learn and much to become.

On that appropriately inspirational note, thank you for your time.

Goodbye.

The outline for the final two thirds was done in class a week or so ago. True to form, the rest was finished ten minutes before the presentation today. Apparently I can only write when it is absolutely clear that 3:15 will be arriving very, very shortly.