Knowing your path vs. finding it

20 years ago, the student body president of my high school went on to UCLA as an economics major.  He said he might want to be a politician someday, which made sense at the time.  But today, he's an emergency room physician and the Associate Medical Director for NBC Universal. 

In first period Spanish, our teacher used to ask the same kid every morning to read the daily bulletin.  He did everything he could to draw that process out and delay the start of class, including making up stories off the top of his head.  His record was a 20-minute class delay. He went to UC Santa Barbara, primarily for the same reason a lot of kids still do--because of this.  And today, he's the vice principal of a high school.

But the math wiz who scored over 750 on the math SAT (with no prep) as a junior, he went to UC Berkeley as a mechanical engineering major, then got his PhD in engineering.  Today, he's the director of engineering at a company making cleaner, renewable fuels.  I'm guessing that none of his old friends who find him on Facebook are surprised by what he's doing or how successful he is.

The engineer became what he knew at age seventeen he wanted to be.  He picked his college and his major based on a career path that he'd already identified, one for which he'd already discovered the aptitude to be successful.

But the doctor and the vice-principal didn't go to college to follow a path; they went to college to find one.  Rather than identifying their future careers while while they were in high school and then choosing a college and a major that would take them to that future, they used their time in college to discover what their real talents where and to find the path they wanted to follow.

A lot of parents we meet at Collegewise express concern that their kids don't know what they want to study in college.  I understand those concerns, and I don't think a student should apply to college without thoughtfully considering what their potential academic interests might be.

But most teenage kids aren't like the engineer I knew back in high school.  Most are more like the doctor and the vice-principal, excited for the opportunity to attend college for reasons that have nothing to do with future careers.  I think that's OK. 

Most successful people didn't pick their path back in high school.  Instead, they discovered it when they were in college, a time in their lives when they had the freedom explore their interests.

If you're a parent and you chose your college like the engineer did, understand that while that worked very well for you, it might not work so well for your kids.  If your student can't plot the next four or ten or thirty years of his life, he's not necessarily directionless; he's just a normal teenager. 

He'll find his path once he gets to college.