Big Five Personality Traits
Despite the enormous difficulties of studying personality traits, we are confident they are like any other phenotypic trait in that genes, the environment and chance determine their values. They are harder to understand because classifying the environment in a way suited to studying personality traits is hard and because a single experience might change your personality but it wouldn’t change your eye colour or height. Although I know I can’t prove it, I believe that my genes and a few key events really have given me my character. Telling the story of these events is useful as it allows me to turn to the role of personal narratives for making sense of the world, and of who we are.
I enjoy life, and most of the time I do not find it too stressful. When I conducted an online survey to score myself on the big five personality traits, I came out as more extrovert than most of the population, emotionally reasonably stable, more agreeable than four out of five folk, at least averagely conscientious, and open to new experiences. I have been told I am intelligent, but those who have said this have never seen me attempt to put together flat-pack furniture.
I have not always had these personality traits. As a child I rarely felt confident, was not particularly popular with my peers, and often found social situations stressful. I was not conscientious with respect to schoolwork and would rather read books and magazines or watch TV, but for as long as I can remember I was fascinated by science. How did I get from the geeky, lazy and shy youth to who I am now? It is due to my genes, the environment I have experienced and apparent chance. I also believe, irrationally, there are a few experiences that changed my personality and my outlook on life.
The mutation at gene GPR143 that impacts my eyesight changed the course of my life when I was a child. My father was a successful pharmacist before he retired at sixty, and this meant that my parents were reasonably financially secure when I was growing up. Dad had gone to the Perse School for Boys in Cambridge, the premier private school in the city, and he thought it would be a good option for me. As I neared my eleventh birthday and the time to move from primary to secondary school approached, my parents arranged to meet with the headmaster of the Perse school. The meeting initially went well, and the head of the school was encouraging that they apply for me to attend and that I would be likely to be offered a place. Towards the end of the meeting my father mentioned my genetic condition and poor eyesight, and explained I would not be opening the batting for the school’s cricket team. On reflection, the headmaster stated, it turned out I probably wasn’t a great fit to the school. He apparently wanted his students to be competent cricketers. Instead, I went to Comberton Village College, a state school in a local village. I suspect that this school was a better choice of school for me, and that the headmaster of the Perse school was correct, but for the wrong reason. My mutation caused a change in my educational environment, the friends I would go on to make and the teachers who struggled to educate me.
I was lazy at secondary school as I didn’t enjoy the drudgery of learning. I liked finding out facts for myself, via experimentation, but I didn’t enjoy learning lists of facts. My dislike of rote learning meant I was hopeless at French, German and Latin, because I refused to learn vocabulary. Because most of the schooling involved rote learning, I did not engage with it. The subjects I liked were maths and science. I liked science because I could do experiments. I devised a school project with my dad where I grew broad bean plants in different types and amounts of soil. Each plant got the same amount of light and water, and I would measure them daily to monitor their progress. It was fun, as I was finding out stuff for myself, and this revealed there were rules to the world. I enjoyed discovering these rules, rather than lists of facts such as the principal cities and towns of all the counties of the British Isles.
Maths was a little like science. There were rules on how numbers could combine or equations could be manipulated. If I understood the rules, I wouldn’t need to learn my times tables but could instead easily work out the answers from first principles. From an early age, I wanted to know why the world worked as it did, rather than learning enough facts to help me navigate it. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. I was taught calculus at secondary school by being given a set of recipes to integrate and differentiate various mathematical functions. I didn’t understand where these recipes came from, and that frustrated me. Up until this point I had been good at maths and was in a class slated to do an examination certificate halfway through the two-year course. I achieved 6 per cent in the mock exams, possibly the lowest mark in the class. On the night before the exam, the penny eventually dropped as I thought things through, and as I stared at the recipes I suddenly understood where they came from and what differentiation and integration were doing, and I could see why they were such incredibly useful tools. The next day I did the exam. I hadn’t learned the recipes but I understood how the bits of calculus I needed worked, and I came fourth highest in the class, being one of only a handful of students who passed. I wished we had been taught why calculus worked, rather than simply how to apply it.
At the age of seventeen, with my A-level exams looming, I was supposed to decide what I wanted to do with my life. Training in mathematics would surely be a safe bet for a reasonable job and so I applied to university to study it. I subsequently received offers, subject to securing the right A-level grades. At around the same time I was applying for university we had a presentation from an ex-pupil who had taken a gap year. He had spent the year overseas teaching in a school in Honduras. I enjoyed travel, this sounded fun, so I decided to apply to Project Trust, the organization that had placed him.
After an interview and a set of selection tests on a remote Scottish island I was told that I would be posted to a school called Chemanza in central rural Zimbabwe, along with three other school-leavers. Just before departing for Africa, I received my A-level results, and I had the grades to study maths at university on my return from my year away. There is absolutely no doubt that my year overseas was formative. It was a remarkable experience, and I will be eternally grateful to Project Trust. It was the first time in my life I had worked hard at anything, and I strove to do a good job. Students that I taught performed at least as well as those in other classes. I grew up a lot in that year, I became much more outgoing and confident, and I hope I inspired some of my students in their educational journey.
During my year of teaching, I fell in love with Zimbabwe and with the people I met. It was also when I decided I didn’t want to be a mathematician, and reapplied to university to study biology, which I eventually did at the University of York. As soon as I was back in the UK, I yearned to return to Africa, and the opportunity arose during my second year at university, when I had to choose an undergraduate research project that would be conducted at the end of my second year. It turned out it was possible to design your own project if you could persuade a faculty member to supervise it. I was fortunate enough to persuade a lecturer in the department to supervise me.