The official recommendations of teacher education in Finland stress the personality growth of student teachers towards an active, highly educated, socially oriented, and humanistic personality. This is a study of three kinds of prospective teachers: nursery school teachers, elementary teachers, and subject teachers. The student teachers of the University of Helsinki and the Institute of Nursery School Teachers (N=721) answered a questionnaire on study orientations, personality traits, career choice motives, and study experiences. A step-wise strategy of analysing the data was used, first describing the differences between the groups, then investigating the relationshps between the domains and the structure of study orientations, and, finally, explaining the study experiences within the domains. The students of nursery and elementary programs were characterized as balanced, extrovert and reform-oriented, and the prospective instructors in home-economics and textile handicafts as conventional and anxious. Subject student teachers were mainly achieving-oriented introverts with weak egos. A close relationship between study orientations and personality traits was found to exist. Pragmatism and achieving were connected with a sense of duty, and reforming and internality with extraversion and originality. Also, career choice motives had the same kind of tendency to correlate with study orientation and personality traits. (Author/JD)