<p>My very intelligent, very focused daughter is graduating this year from one of the HYPS. Suddenly, she seems less focused than ever before. She's been planning to take the LSAT for a year now, with the hope of going off to law school after taking a year off, but keeps postponing taking the test (law school has been the plan for sometime now). In addition, it seems like every day she changes her mind about what she might want to do with her life and some of the ideas seem pretty far fetched. I'm a bit frustrated. She's always been so focused, and after putting her through a very expensive college, I'm a little disappointed that she seems a bit immature and unfocused. Anyone with a similar experience?</p>
<p>I’m 62, and still hoping to grow up to be a pixie.</p>
<p>(Why does she have to decide what to do with her life NOW?)</p>
<p>mini,
You made me smile :)</p>
<p>But you are, mini!</p>
<p>Her hesitation may be due to many recent news stories about the precarious job situation facing most law school graduates…even those attending T-14 schools and from possibly having older classmates/friends who are experiencing this firsthand. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t blame her considering I know of dozens of unemployed or underemployed law school grads since the 2008 recession…including those who graduated from schools as highly ranked as Columbia, NYU, and Harvard and are buried in 100-200K in law school loan debt. </p>
<p>Heck, I know a 2008 law school graduate who is struggling with a $400K undergrad/law school debt despite being one of the few lucky ones with a lawyer type job…making $30K/year.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I can relate, LOL! My Class of 2013 junior, who has been planning from Day 1 to go to grad school in her subject of study, told us a week ago that maybe she would like to become a symphony manager. Hmmm…I am doing a yeoman’s job of NOT being “Killjoy Mom.” If she can manage to find a job in the field, she would absolutely LOVE that job…</p>
<p>I think that as graduation day nears, kids start to second and third guess themselves. I know a number of kids from HYPS who spent the first couple of years after college graduation underemployed as they worked to “find themselves.” Most have figured things out and have continued on their paths and do not seem to be any worse for the wear.</p>
<p>So your D may go to law school, but it may not be next year or even the year after that.</p>
<p>If she has been that focused for the past 20 years, sounds like she is just plain old burned out. Tell her to take the summer off, find a “fun” summer job maybe and just relax. Reevaluate in September.</p>
<p>Personally I would be crying if my child wanted to go into law right now. It’s a tough field to do anything in right now.</p>
<p>[The</a> Top of My Todo List](<a href=“Paul Graham”>The Top of My Todo List)</p>
<p>Maybe she’s changed her mind, and doesn’t know how to tell you/what to do next. If she seems immature, it’s only because she’s young. I think a certain amount of graduation panic is perfectly okay. After all, they’ve spent their entire life up to this point being educated, and now that’s over. All they have to do is find a job in a field they like, or at least a job they can endure, set up a household, and start life without relying on anyone or a safety net of mom/dad. Yikes!</p>
<p>I would be curled up in a ball, in this economy. Maybe you should broach the subject in a compassionate, sympathetic way.</p>
<p>I think your daughter sounds perfectly normal. My intelligent, focused son’s emotions seem to be seesawing between happiness and anxiety, determination and paralysis. He’s leaving college and his friends. Life is beginning. He can’t job hunt until he’s ready to start work, so all he can do is follow Craigslist and get nervous. The job market is uncertain, to put it mildly. But even if it weren’t, this would be a bittersweet time. Just last night my H and I had a conversation about this and decided to shift some family plans so that our son can separate from college on his own terms. I could hear the relief in his voice when we suggested this new plan.</p>
<p>Give your daughter a little more space, and a big hug. She’ll be okay.</p>
<p>Although I can understand how these young people feel – and postponing law school or some other type of graduate school is a sensible decision if you’re unsure that you want to take that step – it’s a shame that they didn’t take advantage of the job recruiting opportunities offered by their universities.</p>
<p>Although it’s true that, in general, you can’t hunt for a job until you’re free to take a job, on-campus recruiting is an exception to this rule. Companies and organizations that choose to become involved in on-campus recruiting know that they will be signing up new employees many months before they can start work. If this arrangement wasn’t OK with the company, the company wouldn’t recruit in this way.</p>
<p>For those of you whose kids are facing the kind of uncertainty that sunflower and geezermom’s kids experienced, but who have not yet started their senior year, it might be a good idea to talk with them about the possibility of seeking a job through on-campus recruiting (which, in some fields, starts with submitting applications online before the school year even starts). The job that they end up with may be an interim one. That’s OK. The idea is to have somewhere to go and something to do after graduation. </p>
<p>The kid who knows “After graduation, I’m going to move to X city, where I have a job with Y company starting in July” has an plan – at least for the short term. And I suspect that these kids feel a lot better than those who graduate with no plan at all.</p>
<p>
True, but the kid who does everything possible with on-campus recruiting and gets nowhere feels a lot worse. It happened to my d. If you think that this doesn’t affect how kids feel after graduation, think again! Luckily, she found an internship in the field she wanted to pursue, and ultimately got a good job, but it was really rough going for a while there.</p>
<p>Well, I was one of those Driven, Ambitious Students who had a Master Plan to go do X, Y and Z upon graduating (almost all of which I wound up doing). But in hindsight, it was incredibly arrogant to think that I had it all figured out at the tender age of 21.</p>
<p>It is often futile to interview for a job with career services when you are not focused on the type of employment you are after. I know this from experience when I graduated. All of my friends were interviewing with career services…sales jobs, banking jobs, etc etc. I tried. None of those career paths really interested me. I was terrible at interviewing because I had no passion or interest in the jobs I was interviewing for. The employers will see through this facade.</p>
<p>I took a year ‘off’ after graduation. Took some grad classes at my instate flagship, worked part time (in a field I thought I might be interested in) to pay the bills, lived in a student flophouse. That experience led me to graduate school in the field that I ended up working in for the next 12 years.</p>
<p>I have to agree with Mini, why does she have to choose a career now? I am nearly 50 and have had 3 very different careers. I expect to have at least one more.</p>
<p>I mentioned the job situation because that’s what the OP was focusing on, but I believe there’s much more to it. I can tell that my son’s current state of mind has to do with leave-taking: friends, college town, apartment, a relatively carefree life, and most of all the academic environment (though he’ll be a lifelong learner for sure). The daughter of a friend said she’s savoring and soaking up every drop of her classes this semester because she’s come to the end of her formal education, and she’ll miss it. It’s a very big change, and I’m certain that he’d feel the same way even if he had a job. </p>
<p>Not every career path has on-campus recruiting. My son is a political science major who wants to be a chef. He has worked his tail off this year in a restaurant so he’ll have experience to bring to a job that he’ll look for when he’s in place to start work. He has a very reasonable plan for the next one to two years, including deciding whether this is what he really wants to do. But he needs to say goodbye to the last four years first. This is a very un-CC thing to say :eek: , but as parents we need to ease up.</p>
<p>College students live in a bubble. They are pushed along by peers, teachers, the pace of studying for exams, trying to graduate ontime, and themselves. Now they have just themselves and are probably rethinking their goals again.</p>
<p>I know of one who graduated last year, moved back home, said that he planned to teach overseas, but just heard from the mom that he will be living at home and starting college over (new major) at a junior college this Fall. My cousin’s son is doing the same (after graduating in biology last year), now studying music at an east coast college. </p>
<p>Has your D considered summer internships around Washington DC, NY, local government? Try a law class during the summer at a law school?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>While I agree that on-campus recrutiing is not the universal answer, I think this part of Marian’s advice is excellent. Students (and their parents) may not always realize how quickly things move job-search-wise during senior year (and even prior to senior year). For some jobs in some careers, the interviewing starts really early. As a clueless non-business-field-parent, I had no idea that the internship that my D had after her junior year could almost guarantee her first job post-graduation.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Most law schools…especially the T-14 don’t offer summer classes. </p>
<p>There’s an expectation that in the summers, law students intern/do summer work at various law firms, legal departments in various public agencies, and public interest legal organizations.</p>
<p>She has been spending most of the past 20 years pleasing others. She is obviously bright, and sometimes trading on that intelligence can get in the way of really figuring out what is most likely to give long-term internal satisfaction. I know that happened to me. </p>
<p>For lots of kids, going to HYPS is “far-fetched”. Give her the chance to think “far-fetching”. This might actually be the first time she’s had a chance to do that in her entire life.</p>
<p>(I would urge her to have absolutely nothing to do with law for awhile - she’s already considered that, and put it aside for now.)</p>
<p>I will add, in the real world, she is probably right there with most of the rest of the kids graduating. In the CC world, she looks like she is behind because everyone here was a model student and all of their kids are as well :D. I’ve said this before, MOST kids do not graduate from college with a job in hand.</p>