<p>Personality is still somewhat flexible at this age so people can definitely change. If you’ve ever seen the MTV show “Made” a number of episodes focus on someone who wants to be more popular or break out of a shell and generally they succeed. It often doesn’t look like the coaches do that much, just in effect give them permission to try rather than saying “I can’t do that”. The makeover often helps, too; take a good luck at how you dress and groom yourself and ask yourself if that image conveys to others how you want them to see you.</p>
<p>Also if you’ve gone to school with more or less the same people for years then you can become typecast and people don’t notice even if you change. I know one girl who was a little chubby in <em>elementary</em> school and she was always seen as a chubby girl although by HS she grew into it and was actually quite pretty. The same thing can happen with being typecast by personality.</p>