Looking to my left now I see my father's bookshelf, which contains hundreds of novels, non-fictions, and guidebooks. But the ones that catch my eye are his old textbooks from college, Intermediate Accounting and The Fundamentals of Marketing for example. Upon request he revealed to me that going into college, his intention was to become a marketer and an accountant, yet his job today could not be more unrelated to both.
While conducting my oral history interview with the owner of Guitar Works in Evanston at the beginning of the semester, I found that he also ended up on a different path than the collegate system had intended. It's obvious that his years studying geology ended up having no relevance to his career as a small business owner.
More examples of college learnings not playing significant roles in the lives of graduates are out there, but I will spare you their stories. I am not suggesting that a college experience cannot enrich people's lives; for the most part it does.
What I am suggesting is that all of us registering for senior classes should try to avoid flow-charting our lives. By this I mean consciously disproving the thought that all the classes we take next year will have great effect on us for the rest of our lives. At this point, the most important thing is to enroll in classes that interest us, and gradually get a more specific idea of what we may or may not want to do in the future. The best that we can do as students is hope that we learn about things that we like, and if we're lucky these things will have something do with our occupations later in life.
I definitely think the relatively recent chaos surrounding college applications is extremely misleading. As we've talked about in class, taking a class just because it's "AP" or would look better on an application, if you're not truly passionate about the subject, is potentially unhealthy. You're buying into the idea that you can only succeed if you follow a certain set of rules and guidelines that are mentally taxing to complete. At a school like New Trier, where the messages of leading a balanced lifestyle while still maintaining a rigorous curriculum are constantly at odds with each other, the decision relies on the individual to discover when a "rigorous curriculum" becomes too much.
ReplyDeleteI think that's it totally true that some people end up having jobs completely different from what they intended to do. I like your line of "ciously disproving the thought that all the classes we take next year will have great effect on us for the rest of our lives." It's absolutely what we do at New Trier. I know it's silly but sometimes I get into that crazed mindset of "I'm never going to succeed in life if I don't take AP Biology." We put way too much stress on the impressiveness of the classes and not the content and interest we have in what we are learning. Good post Claire!
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