Case Study 2

1. Background Information:

The subject for this study is an 18 year old male engineering college student. He is from a well to do middle class family. An active student at school, he would be the eternal attention grabber. Having spent early part of his years in Moscow, Russia, he had developed a very distinctive and open outlook towards society and culture when he moved back to India when he was 10 years old.

He would start questioning things that are quintessentially a part of Indian traditions and practices. Many things came as a culture shock for him. However, he adjusted quite well to the best of his capacities. He gained a high sense of confidence, which often came out at the time of problems and difficulties. He developed a cherubic, outgoing and talkative personality, which made him quite popular among girls too. In short, he was highly extrovert and took part in all kinds of social activities.

After getting reasonably good marks in class X boards, he moved to a good school with a modern outlook. There, he was a nobody. This sudden change of environment made him change his habits and personality. He moved towards westernization of thought, words and actions. Brand labels, mall hopping, rap music, disco nights attracted him. He was often ridiculed for his elitist thoughts and fake pretensions.

He would indulge in activities that were taboo, or at times, immoral. In the process, he flunked his school term exams as well as coaching tests. Not being a part of the engineering exam rat race gave him a unique sense of liberation and independence.

Being the smart guy that he was, he realized that it wasn’t possible for him cope up with the huge amount of syllabus that he had piled up. In the process, he started staying indoors and instead of aiming for a topshot college, he changed his goals in time for a college that was decent enough and started training for it. He started regaining overall confidence, and was able to enjoy the last of his school years thoroughly.

He got into the college he aimed to study in. He still has drinking problems, which I hope he will realize and rectify soon. But he has become much more focused on his study goals and aims to get an MBA degree, which will put him on a much stronger foundation, and will give direction to his communication and socializing ability for an excellent future ahead.

2. Emotional Analysis:

• Being an extrovert, and quite socially active, he rates high in amount of Positive Affectivity measures.
• He has a high degree of variation and control of emotions.
• He has emotion-focused coping approach which he actually uses very effectively to get out of sticky situations.
• He is emotionally intelligent, in the sense that he can easily identify and react to emotions of other people.
• His self-esteem, which was once very low, has now increased considerably in college

3. Cognitive Analysis:

• He has a non-autotelic personality, and so gets easily distracted, and does activities superficially.
• However, he is a highly creative personality, and infuses creativity into everything he does. This is evident from his interests, that include music / DJ Mixing
• He often shows mindfulness in his activities, however, he can attain much higher levels of attention control and curiosity.
• He has high level of positive optimism, even for the immediate future.

4. Behavioral Analysis:

• Self Efficacy component is very high in him, i.e. he has full belief that he can complete challenges put to him
• Sometimes, he is unable to generate workable pathways to achieve his goals, in other cases, he lets his motivational level fall down easily.
• Ability to set short term and realistic goals and achieve them is very high in him
• He often lives in an illusory world where he thinks all his needs are fulfilled. However this is his short term behavior, and behaves realistically most of the time.

5. Why I chose to study him:

A conclusion that I can observe from his history and profile is that the present free will of an individual is important. Certain environmental factors can affect us in different ways, but overall, we grow the way we choose to. Good and bad are subjective, but we always have certain shades of grey. It is the manner how we cope with them that is important.

Pehchaan kaun??