| The purpose of this study was to investigate differences between personality characteristics of female and male freshmen, engineering students. A secondary purpose was to ascertain whether personality characteristics of freshmen, engineering students were different from those of general collegiate students of the same sex.;The Millon Index of Personality Styles (MIPS) was administered to a sample of 72 female and 86 male freshmen, engineering students at a private midwestern engineering institution. The MIPS college normative sample of 1,600 college students was used as a comparison group. A total of 24 personality characteristics were assessed in the domains of motivation aims, cognitive modes, and interpersonal behaviors.;Four hypotheses, which dealt with comparisons of the engineering samples, were tested by way of discriminant analyses. Two hypotheses, which compared the engineering samples to the collegiate samples of the same sex, were tested by way of t-tests. All six hypotheses yielded significant differences across various personality variables.;It was concluded that engineering students of both sexes were more similar than different in personality characteristics. It was also concluded that there were greater personality differences between freshmen male engineering students and male college students than there are between freshmen female engineering students and female college students. |
