Hello, all. I’ve been a lurker for over two years now and have used your amazing advice to support my middle child during his college quest. He is happily settling into his sophomore year at college and doing well. His search was easy; he knew his area of focus and we were able to narrow our search with top schools with research capabilities. I am grateful for the help of this site!
I’m now starting the college search for youngest daughter, who is a junior this year. The struggle is that she has no idea what she wants to do other than that she wants to attend a good college. She is an excellent writer, loves reading, puzzles and solving problems. She does well in biology but didn’t like chemistry. She struggles in math and does not enjoy math classes. She is considering something in publishing/editing or becoming a high school counselor but these are not set in stone either.
She has a weighted 4.0 GPA and earned an 1130 on the “new” PSAT 10. She’s in the top 8% of her graduating class. Her reading and writing score was a 610 with her math earning a 520. She knows she needs to raise the math score to be more competitive and we are working through Khan Academy to improve her score before taking the SAT later this year. She will take the ACT to see if she has a better score on this test. She is taking college prep courses at her high school and will have AP Biology this year, AP Lit and APUSH next year.
She is a lifelong learner and enjoys learning for learning’s sake. She wants to attend a smaller college or university and at this point we are steering her towards liberal arts colleges/universities where she can take classes in a variety of areas and find something that may click for her. She is not a partier nor is she interested in athletics. She is a competitive dancer and loves to organize things - closets, pantries, clothing, planners. We have looked over the Colleges That Change Lives list and will visit several after she narrows the list down a bit. She does suffer from anxiety which is now under good control but it does flare on occasion. She does not want to be more than 5-6 hours from home. We live in Michigan.
Do any of you know of any aptitude assessments she could take that would help her find her focus? She gets anxious about not knowing what she wants to do even though her father and I tell her lots of people attending college have no idea either. She rates herself on her older siblings - who both knew what they wanted to do for years.
I welcome any suggestions as we move through this exciting quest. I am confident we will find the right fit and know that we have time.
I hope I posted this in the correct section of the forum.
Have your D take a Briggs Meyers personality assessment. If your high school has Naviance, this assessment might be offered there. You can also access free versions of it online.
Daughter’s on third major, and when I asked her what she planned to do for a JOB she admits she has no plans except to be a princess. At Disney. Where she’ll make about $12.50/hr. For the rest of her life.
I’m sure the current history major will go a long way toward that goal.
Ouch! Has she interned at Disney? That may help her see what the job is really like. I have learned in the past several years that everyone’s path is different. I keep telling myself this.
Disney does promote from within quite often and could be a viable career. She could become a Disney historian.When my youngest was little she wanted to be a dog walker. I told her that was a wonderful second job.
It is absolutely normal for a college sophomore not to know what she wants to do, and I don’t think it’s necessary for her to know what she wants to select a college, either. Most colleges - especially selective ones - will have a wide range of interests and majors she can explore, and she can explore different career areas through internships and even through her first job or two. Selecting a college with good career services support might be a priority in this case, then.
I don’t know that inventories/assessments are necessarily the way to go. It turns out that most of the personality assessments that are designed for identifying your ideal job are not very reliable from test to retest - mine changed a lot as I grew up, my interests changed, and my likes and dislikes morphed over time. Myers-Briggs is a good example, too; research done on the test has shown it’s not really reliable over several retests, and the constructs that were put together were basically put together from the authors’ intuition and not from any true systematic research into personality types. (For example, there’s no evidence that being Judging and Perceiving, or Sensing and Intuitive, are opposite ends of a continuous scale. Thinking and Feeling definitely are not opposite ends of a continuum; they are orthogonal to each other).
I’m not saying don’t take them, but I am saying that if she does take the results with a grain of salt. They’re all broad strokes, anyway. Honestly, the questions themselves and the way she thinks about and evaluates the questions may be more indicative than the results. For example, the RIASEC questions may help her think about broad strokes - does she like analyzing and investigating problems and solving things like a puzzle? (I would have never said yes at 15, but my answer is emphatically yes now at 30.) Does she want to work outside or inside, at a desk all day, regular hours, or sort of whenever/flexible? Does she like to talk to people all day or would she rather plug into her work without interacting with others much?
And I still think that this should be mostly very BROAD strokes, without the immediate goal of identifying a career area. My high school yearbook says I planned to major in biology and go pre-med. I’d changed my mind before I even graduated from high school, lol! I changed my major twice more over the summer before I started and then again before the end of my first semester. And even once I had settled on a major, I changed my career goals many times…through college, through graduate school, and in my postdoctoral fellowship. LOL!
I’ll add that with a D who is not sure about what she wants to do, focusing on a college that offers a broad-based educational experience might be best. Starting her down a path of something more specific or skill-based (accounting/teaching/nursing/engineering and the like) could result in significant “starting over” time if she changes her mind midstream.
There’s nothing wrong with changing majors per se, and it was certainly very common when I was in college (and I did it myself!) but these days, it can be more difficult. Some public universities frankly don’t permit it, or make it very difficult. And even where permitted, it can add a year or two to the undergraduate experience, thereby increasing the cost of the degree. Back in our day, an extra year or two could amount to a few grand…not so today.
So, with the truly undecided kids, go for the liberal arts colleges, or the liberal arts majors at large universities. These types of majors can give students a good couple years to earn useful credits without losing any time. And, they can expose students to many different disciplines so that, ultimately, a major and career path can be chosen that will stick.
I think it’s nuts that kids are supposed to come out of high school knowing what they want to do for the rest of their lives (more power to them if they do, but it’s just disheartening to me, I guess).
I am for sure a dying breed, but I am still a firm believer in LACs. Learn to think. Learn to communicate. Grow in many areas. She will also have smaller class sizes and get more focused support from faculty.
Many LACs are recognizing their fallibility and introducing combination-based learning and curriculum (more business courses or even as a major, in some cases). Your daughter will have a chance to explore and experience lots of kinds of different classes and a few will really resonate with her, and she will always find an interesting arts/dancing community in almost all LACs I can think of off the top of my head.
I agree with your instinct, OP, to focus on LACs. She’ll figure it out, I promise!
Thanks @juillet . I had a feeling that was the case. My Myers-Briggs has changed over the years too. Job passion not so much. Have almost always known what I wanted to be and have done the same field all of my life. I keep telling my children how rare that is.
@prospect1 and @NinaReilly it appears I am thinking the right way - liberal arts college. We have many good ones to choose from in the state. Just need her to think about size and fit from here.
She overthinks things and tends to put everyone else before her own needs so this task is rather daunting. It is crazy, too, how much we expect our teenagers to know what they want to do at the ages 17/18. I will encourage her to continue looking at the CTCL list as well as many of the LACs in our home state. I’m just trying to make this process as anxiety free as possible.
I’m a huge fan of LACs, but I know that small privates aren’t always within everybody’s budget, and some students want a bigger campus. Keep in mind that every state flagship I can think of has a liberal arts college/curriculum within the university, and many have honors colleges perks as well. In some states, the public U’s liberal arts college is quite renowned (think Michigan, Berkeley, and the like).
Make her read, read, read. Articles in the New Yorker. Op-Eds in the Economist. Letters to the editor in the Wall Street Journal. Vanity Fair. The Atlantic, New Republic.
How can a kid possibly know what she wants to do with her life- she’s probably never heard of 80% of the careers that are out there. And new career paths are forming overnight. I work in human resources for a large corporation and the people my age are often scratching our heads- “this is an actual job?”. Yes, an actual job. Many of them pay extraordinarily well.
Keep her reading and questioning. Tell her to major in History or Philosophy or Urban Planning or English or Econ- and to take a sequence in statistics no matter what she majors in. She’ll figure it out.
And yes- try to get her excited about math. She doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist, but having a strong foundation in math (stats often come easier to kids who don’t like geometry or trig) is going to be enormously helpful for her later life.
Friends and I took advantage of testing for aptitude and interest eons ago when we were college sophomores. It was free through the college career (whatever it was called) center. I’m sure many colleges offer such testing. For now she should continue to do her best in HS. She should look at colleges that fit her academic profile, those will likely have the majors that will interest her. So many changes will occur in the next few years that will help her figure out her path.
She needs to know that the best path at this point is a flexible one. She will sign up for various college courses that meet breadth requirements and one of them may lead to her major.
btw- check with your HS guidance department. They often do testing with kids to discover the type of person they are- junior year seems about the stage. They likely have lists of occupations for various educational levels that go along with test results. There are several combinations of some traits that lead to various types of careers.
Many schools have specific first year programs for exploratory track and/or undecided students, as they encourage students to make informed choices about their majors based on course affinity and classroom performance.
As you continue your search, be sure to check out any First Year, Exploratory options. Often, a student can declare as undecided in a department or division, i.e. Undeclared in the Humanities, or Undeclared in Social Sciences. Students are not required to declare a major (with some exceptions) until the end of their sophomore year.
While knowing a students major preference can be helpful in narrowing down schools, since you’re thinking that she’d be more attracted to the LAC’s I would suggest that you focus on the fit of the school in general. Likely, if she’s targeted a “good” school, they’ll be ab;e to assist her with determining that major within her first two years.
@prospect1 We live in Michigan and realize what a gem LSA is at UofM. It just may be too large for her thinking. We plan on running the NPC together this weekend to see which privates are within reach.
@blossom She’s taking current events this year so you’ve given us great suggestions. Her older brother loves The Atlantic. They could skype and discuss when he leaves for college in a few weeks. She is considering English as a major with an emphasis on publishing.
@wis75 The high school guidance dept. is stretched and does not provide that kind of support. They do not even have Naviance. Each counselor sees 300+ students. Most students graduating from this high school go to community college or the state directionals.
@hop Thanks for the suggestion for first year exploratory courses. We hope to visit lots of schools this year to narrow fit criteria - near cities, small, large, etc.
Agree with Mathyone. I took a vocational test in high school which recommended Social Work.
I work for a global corporation in talent management- so the testing clearly identified some aspect of my personality (the people part?) that was a fit. But the boxes they put you in are so limiting compared with the endless number of interesting careers that are out there. And I think they encourage undecided kids to aim low both intellectually and professionally.
I liked history and literature in HS. I majored in Classics in college. THAT was a good fit. But a test which predicted that I’d be a HS teacher (which seems to be what most parents think is the only thing to do with a degree in history or Classics) would have kept me from my first job out of college in an executive training program, plus everything that came after that.
OP- if your D majors in English she doesn’t need to emphasize publishing. If she is interested in journalism she needs to load up on political science and econ (the two fields where journalists can still earn a living wage). If she’s interested in working for a publishing company (an industry undergoing major contractions) she’ll find a few accounting or finance classes more useful than actual publishing. And an entry level CS, Stats, or even a summer teaching herself Drupal or another packaged software product used by bloggers and website designers- hugely helpful in publishing right now.