<p>I guess my kids are weird. The oldest wanted to be a teacher from little on up. Her first choice was to be an elementary teacher, but her spelling is atrocious and she didn’t want second graders correcting her, plus her summers as a camp counselor showed her just how exhausting little kids can be. She is now a math teacher in a small village in AK and thrilled to see a middle schooler show math aptitude which makes her think she’ll be able to offer a calculus class for him in the future. Entire high school has 17 students, so she still has the camplike intimate environment that she loved.</p>
<p>Youngest, at three, announced that she wanted to be a proctologist after asking what the word meant and finding it hysterical that she could be paid “to look at peoples’ butts”. She is now a physician assistant and being well paid to look at those butts (as well as other body parts). </p>
<p>But they are the exception. Students change majors an average of three times during their college years. </p>
<p>My wife and I both exited college doing something completely different than we thought we would be doing when we entered college, or when we graduated for that matter. My career has been pretty stable, but I had a couple of major inflections in what I was doing, one around age 30, and the next in my mid-40s. Since her first career-type job after college, my wife has had three or four sharp reversals of field; she is a national expert in something she never thought about until she was in her mid 30s. It was part of the portfolio of a position for which she was hired because of her expertise in the other parts of the job, but it wound up consuming her attention and her career.</p>
<p>At the moment, our 27-year-old daughter seems to have a clear career path, but it began with an unexpected job offer that came three weeks before her college graduation, when her job search was pointed in a completely different direction. It has nothing to do with her college major, or with what she thought when she was 16 (which did relate to her college major). Her brother, 25, is looking for direction, having decided not to take any of the alternative paths he was looking at six months ago. I won’t say we’re not a little apprehensive about him, but he’s done an OK job of supporting himself post-college, and he has marketable skills (or so he claims), so we’re waiting patiently to see where it all takes him. Whatever he does, it won’t bear any resemblance to what he thought when he was a high-school sophomore (and didn’t think about his future at all, as far as I could tell), or even when he went to college (when he was in the middle of a period when he thought he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up). But, at least so far, it looks like it will come pretty directly out of the academic interests that he developed in college.</p>
<p>Please don’t waste energy worrying about your 16-year-old’s career direction.</p>
<p>Some young people I know, in their mid to late 20s, are doing exciting jobs that didn’t even exist when they began college. How does someone plan for that? No idea.</p>