In the last month I have spoken to two high school parent groups, and one group made up of parents and students. Combined, there were over 150 parents and about 50 students who attended.
The focus of all of these talks was that there are four major components of the college decision process, and almost everyone ignores at least one.
The four major college questions are:
1. Where will I go? (which includes, How can I get in to my top choices?)
2. What will I major in?
3. How much will it cost?
4. What will I do when I get out?
The one that often gets postponed until later is #2, and # 4 often gets ignored completely. And doing so can have HUGE implications on #1 and #3. I hear parents say (way too frequently) that we can’t expect a 16, 17, or 18 year old student to possibly know what they will do when they graduate. As I’ve told my audiences recently, it is O.K. if they can’t answer the question definitively, but it is NOT O.K. if they don’t have any kind of game plan for how they are going to figure it out. And the longer it takes them to figure it out the more it will cost them. And waiting until they are in college to figure it out why they are there in the first place can be the most costly approach of all.
The second thing I emphasize is that just as #1 consists of following a pretty rigorous process for completing and submitting applications, #2 is also a process that consists of lots of activities that don’t just happen overnight. This is an important distinction for this generation of students, because so many of them have been raised with the ‘game reset’ mentality, expecting immediate results or just starting over when the going gets tough.
Helping them to focus on creating a process for choosing a career can be a major step in becoming a successful, independent adult. PeopleRight Careers focuses on helping students understand how they are wired, and how that wiring effects the type of work they will be good at. And who doesn’t want to be good at what they do?