Madi+T’s+2017+OpEd+Article

I change my mind on what I want to be when I grow up about every few months or so. I’ve gone from being an artist, to a traveling journalist, to a neonatal specialist, to an aerospace engineer, to forensics. I have thought of so many different paths and they change so quickly that choosing my major for college seems impossible. Having to decide what area of expertise we want to potentially stay in for the next 50 years of our lives is crazy. Being a terrible decision maker myself, I can understand why people go into college undeclared, but I also know that being undeclared can really set you back in the race to graduate in good time.

With my luck, I’ll have chosen engineering as my major, spent a year or two with that field and decide, “hey maybe I DO want to go into medicine”, and I will have to start almost from scratch, pay for the extra courses I need to catch up, and then come up with a plan on how to get myself through med school. The pressure put on kids to “find” themselves so young is incredible.

When I toured at Cal Poly, my guide told a story about how a friend of hers changed his major somewhere around five times before he graduated. I am the type of person who likes the mix things up every once in awhile because I get bored of routine so quickly. The concept of figuring out where I see myself 20 years from now is absurd. How on Earth are we supposed to know what career best suits us if we are only given experience with super general fields? We aren’t exposed to specific jobs or specialties until we are already in college studying something completely opposite. As teenagers, we don’t have the experience we need to decide what we want. So far, the juniors have had the opportunity to take multiple courses in science, math, english, spanish, history, art, medical technology, but what if none of those courses have interested us enough to want a career in them for - well, ever? The concept of space interests me greatly, but I have no idea if a job in that field will fit my personality because I have had no exposure to it. Of course, there is a reason we need to pick a path so young. We need to be educated so we can go into our career, develop clientele, and make a living for ourselves and our families.

I think there needs to be some other way for students to be exposed to all kinds of subjects and learn how a life in that area looks. Our school is supposed to set us up for college better than most, and as I feel like the adjustment will be easier, I don’t necessarily feel like I have clarity as to where I want to go. I feel that the biggest problem for teens this age, thinking about the future, is that they can’t picture it.

Approximately 52.3% (the majority) of Americans aren’t happy in their job. Obviously this is due to countless reasons, but one may be because as kids, they go in, not completely matured, no outside, real world experience, and pick an area that interests them to study in college. 15 years later, they had no clue what that field really entailed and now they’re miserable, only continuing to get up every weekday so they can feed their family and keep a roof over their heads. My fear is that the exact same thing happens to me, simply because no one gave me the opportunities to explore different subjects outside of the broad courses we take in high school.