<p>csdad - Interesting example. What would you suggest in terms of social skills? If a jock has a nerd brain, would s/he be more satisfied in a jocky environment or with nerds?</p>
<p>Interesting question. My youngest D had this experience. She was a very good swimmer, top 10 in class, did theatre outside of swim season. What we observed with her was that she seemed to prefer “hanging with” the more brainy, theatre kids. Although she liked her swim teammates & did things with them during the season, her better friends ended up being the theatre kids.</p>
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<p>I believe every parent here does, but whether they are capable of doing so is another matter. That’s partially why we are here on CC.</p>
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<p>If depends whether X is a stepping stone or a detour to Y, as related to what csdad says:</p>
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<p>And happy with.</p>
<p>Here’s a good example. mathmom’s S1 is good at both verbal and math, got accepted at both Harvard and CMU, but chose the latter. Obviously he knew what he’s good at and is happy 4 years later.</p>
<p>geeps, I remember all my phone numbers back to fourth grade and we moved every two or three years. Given the number of ours we wasted parsing our SAT scores my senior year in high school it’s no wonder I am unable to forget them. (I remember the exact scores of my two best friends as well.)</p>
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<p>In those cases – or at least the case of my sister – the people went to college without “a careful self evaluation,” and the in-college major change corrected that. I’m not certain, though, how my sister was supposed to know she couldn’t pass college physics? She was smart enough and did well enough in school to get into Stanford, so it’s not like she had a lot of experience with failure and hitting her limitations. Her math SAT score, while well below 800, was nowhere near low enough to suggest that she couldn’t handle quantitative thought (and, indeed, she does lots of it in her adult career). She did fine in high school physics and calculus. She probably COULD have passed physics and completed the geology major had she done it a few years later. She is very successful in the business world.</p>
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<p>No, really, what difference does it make, as long as the person ends up at Y? What difference does the detour make? If my interested-in-chemistry daughter winds up majoring in art history instead, what possible difference does it make if she entered school wanting to major in chemistry? You seem to have this real sense of “danger” if the student goes from X to unrelated Y, and I am trying to figure out why you are so concerned, concerned enough to want to try to “prevent” it by supposed magical self-evaluations or parental evaluations that will suss it all out at age 16, 17, 18.</p>
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<p>In 4-6 years is fine, but in 20-30 years is not when lost on the way there.</p>
<p>Perhaps if the SAT were really an aptitude test with unreachable ceilings (individual sections), our 15-19 years old students would have a better sense of where one needs to go.</p>
<p>Life’s a journey, not a destination. So you take a job in X for a few years, and in the lessons you learn there, decide you’d rather be a Y. For that matter, our children are entering a world in which the jobs that they’ll have ten, fifteen years from now don’t even exist today. </p>
<p>You still seem wedded to this idea that a student’s interests are somewhere deep inside them at age 15 - 19, that some magical insight / testing will suss them out, they’ll be identified, the student will study those areas, and that’s that. You seem really resistant to and uneasy with the concept that interests do change over time. Since nothing in life is ever written in stone – why are you so uneasy with it? I like to plan as much as the next person, but it’s very in-the-box thinking to assume that interests shouldn’t change. I liked majoring in econ and math THEN and I’m glad for where it got me for my first job … but if I were to do it today, I might choose something entirely different. So what? The things that interest me intellectually today are also entirely different from the things that interested me back then. Why are you so wedded to a model which says that the individual is “fixed” at 15 - 19?</p>
<p>I know a number of scientists who in their 40s decided they’d had enough of the rat race of grant writing and went to work for patent lawyers. They are very desirable apparently.</p>
<p>This may not be a good analogy, but I guess I’m talking about something like a soul mate rather than a beautiful woman or a handsome man as a partner before finding a soul mate (if one exists or ever found). Nothing’s wrong with the early part of life though (from a non religious point of view).</p>