At lot of the career advice I received as a child led me to respond "No way! I do NOT want to do that!" The usual response by the grownups around me was to try to convince me that I should be more open-minded about such things, or to try to convince me that I really could do it if I work hard and put my mind to it.
What they really should do when a student is resistant to a particular career path is determine what exactly they don't like about it, and use that information to guide them towards something more suitable.
For example, many adults tried to convince me to go into engineering. If they had thought to ask, I would have told them that I didn't want to go into engineering because you had to make actual things that actually worked. With suitable leading questions, I could have given the example of enrichment workshops where we had to make bridges or rube goldberg machines out of paper and glue and cotton balls and string, and while I had a solid grounding in the necessary theory and some innovative ideas, I found making the things actually function was impossible, and far more frustrating than anything else I faced academically. A knowledgeable teacher or guidance counsellor could then point me towards something that uses the same strengths that lead them to think I'm suitable for engineering, but is less tangible.
Aptitude tests kept giving me a set of possible career paths that included psychologist and clergy person. I didn't want to do either of those because they're such intense people work that need far more emotional intelligence than I have (plus, for the clergy thing, I'm an atheist). My guidance counsellor's next step should have been to look at things that use the same aptitudes, but don't require people skills.
For a time, it was trendy to encourage students to go to college instead of university. While I have nothing against college in principle, college programs train you in a specific career, and none of those career appealed to me. Meanwhile, university programs train you in an academic subject, so I could study something I like and am good at rather than train for a career I find unappealing. For example, college-encouragers would always tell me "You don't have to go to university, you know. You could go to college and do Travel and Tourism! You like languages!" Yes, but I hate travel and tourism! Why would I want to commit at 18 to a career in something I hate rather than spending the next four years studying something I love? In any case, a useful response would have been to either identify college programs that would be more appealing to me, or to recognize that I'm well-suited to university and look for useful programs there.
A student's disinclination towards a particular field is just as informative as their enthusiasm for a particular field, and it shouldn't be written off just because it's negative. Especially when combined with the What can you do better than others? method, asking students what they don't want to do and why could go a long way towards pinpointing the right field for them.
4 comments:
I'm guessing by college you mean what here in the USA is called community college. Although I certainly recognize the practical advantages of practical training over liberal education, I get a little creeped out if people are being steered away from the latter, even assuming the latter is purely a "status good," a contention which I just don't buy, anyway. A generation or two before I was born every working class kid was told, oh, what strong hands you have, you should excel in our vocational program, etc.
My dad was heavily encouraged by a probably-well-meaning neighbor to major in engineering, based frankly on 'that's where the money is' or something. He dropped out in the first semester of college and subsequently suffered what back then they called a nervous breakdown.
I myself majored in math. At the time I wanted to be a math professor when I grew up. By about junior year it was clear I didn't have the grades (marks?) to be a serious candidate for graduate school. I probably should have changed majors, but I was more than halfway through, and while not being the first generation of my family to attend university (see above) I did end up being the first to graduate…for what it's worth.
I think you are 1000% right in stating that part of career planning has to include the question "what are you better than others at." There's simply no paying gig, at any level, that you can get without "beating out some competition." I'd also add the question of "what do you believe in." I know it probably sounds stupid, but the reason I chose to major in math is because I saw it (and still see it) as a field which is impossible to fake an understanding of, even in an informal setting like a cocktail party. It wasn't my strongest subject in high school (that was French) and not my strongest subject in university (Russian). Looking back on it, not long into university it wasn't exactly subtle that the summer jobs posted on bulletin boards in the vicinity of the math dept. had a strong tendency to be for nightmare factories such as Sandia, Brookhaven, Los Alamos, N. S. fucking A. etc. I should have taken that as a cue to switch majors sooner rather than later. Ironically, in my junior year existential crisis I toyed with the idea of changing my major to linguistics (I like languages too!) but thinking about it, it seems the linguistics majors are even more likely to be trapped in the puzzle palace than the math majors.
You're also so very very on point about asking "what do you not want to do." Aside from the fact that I don't do defense work (I hope I haven't burned any bridges by turning down temp agency gigs w. defense contractors, but some principles are inviolate) I'm honestly open to trying virtually anything other than sales. I hate sales, if nothing else, because of the Golden Rule. I'd even consider B2B inside sales, but of course that's not where one pays ones sales dues.
I think the pushing people towards college thing was meant to counter the trend of students blindly going to university even if they're better suited to something else, but unfortunately they went too far and forgot that some of us are better suited to university than other things. (I have nothing against college and wouldn't hesitate to go if I wanted a career change, but all the subjects I was best at were taught in university and not in college.)
I had no idea that math led to so many military jobs! I know a couple of people who majored in math, but they either remained in academia or went on to something completely unrelated (one is now a professional musician.)
In the USA, the NSA is by far the largest employer of mathematicians.
That seems like the sort of thing they really should tell people before they choose their major.
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