Thursday, May 26, 2016

Don't force career decisions too soon

Lately, I’ve started to notice a trend. As I meet with students and parents and we discuss life after high school I often sense that many parents are placing a lot of pressure on their children to identify a career path early in high school. While I believe forward thinking is valuable and students do need to be conscious of that gigantic looming decision, making that decision in the 9th or 10th grade is probably overkill.
When I say this in meetings with parents and children I usually sense some relief on the student’s part and a bit of surprise on the parent’s. So, that tells me this pressure parents place on students might be the cause of a lot of anxiety in students. The fact of that the matter is that leaving home and heading off into the wide world is scary. One’s career is at the forefront of the big wide world so talk of career forces a student to face those fears. However, that is not really my point here.
Instead, I mean to say that I’m not sure a 15-year-old is emotionally equipped to select the career they’ll be doing every day for the rest of their lives. An adolescence is still trying to find themselves as a human being and forcing them to choose a career on top of that, when there are so many over variables still in play, compounds that internal strife.
Colleges and universities tell us that as many as 60% of their sophomores are in a different major than they would they applied to. That means that most college students changed their major between their senior year of high school when they applied to college and their sophomore year of college. That’s okay!
I do think that college majors and careers need to enter a high school student’s thought process from time to time, but constantly badgering a student with questions along the lines of “What are you going to be when you grow up?” are fruitless.  There are more subtle ways to get a student to think about these things. Moreover, parents and students need to start with a mutual understanding that it is okay for these conversations, the external ones and internals ones, to be full of doubt and uneasiness. Part of that comes with the fact that students often don’t fully understand what someone in a given profession truly does on a day to day basis or the education required to get there.

That’s not a call to make your child shadow everyone in town--that’s an ordeal that most teenagers aren’t going to be up for. However, it is an opportunity for a parent to say something like the following. “I’m glad you’re enjoying your world history class so much. You know, one way you could translate a class like that into a career is through anthropology or archeology. There are people who go out and find old things from these old cultures and times you are studying about. Of course, sometimes you might have to spend three months away from your family digging around in the desert for them, but it’s pretty cool if you discover something really big.” Then just leave it at that. If the subject comes back around later, you can add to it then. Or, the issue might be a dead horse not worth beating. The point is to give your child little pieces of information and give them the opportunity to learn and explore about a variety of careers without forcing them down their throat. More importantly, don’t make them choke on the need to make that decision before they even leave high school in the first place. I’ll continue this topic with a discussion more centered on life in college next month.