Life Advice: Choosing the right school and career

To help pick a career after high school, you can; identify your interests, analyze your strengths and weaknesses, research potential career paths, explore job outlooks, consider internships or volunteering, talk to career counselors, and reflect on activities that energize you; essentially, understanding what you enjoy and what skills you have can guide your career choice. Some main key steps are self-reflection, such as identifying your interests. Make a list of activities you enjoy, like classes you like, and hobbies to discover potential career fields that align with your passions. As well as assessing your strengths and weaknesses, recognize your natural abilities and areas where you might need to develop skills. Lastly, consider your work style reflect on whether you prefer working independently, collaboratively, in a fast-paced environment, or with a structured routine.

When choosing a college, you can consider things like location, campus environment, majors, financial aid, School size, college scorecard, and values. You can also reflect on what’s important to you, where you want to be, and who you want to become. The heart of the matter is students don’t do before senior year is college planning. Such as, coming up with a list of colleges you’d might like to attend, exploring different majors you want to go into, establishing if you’re staying local or if you’ll be international or in the state. Then researching is one of the main key points for finding the college you want to attend to. Researching colleges helps students make informed decisions about which school is best for them. Researching colleges helps students personalize their applications and explain why they want to attend a particular school. Also researching can help students identify if that school is a good academic and social fit for them. Inquiring information can help build skills like critical thinking, creative problem-solving, and analytical skills. Research allows students to identify gaps in the knowledge and understanding of their chosen field, or even to make a substantial contribution to the existing body of research. It also provides opportunities for collaboration with other professionals and can lead to job opportunities. 

-Shakya Thompson