Posting from the Road

I am posting from a borrowed laptop, so pleases excuse my funky typing.


My oldest niece is of the age that people started asking her about her college plans. Well, she still has to take the SAT (arrgh, arrgh, she says), and she doesn't know where she wants to go or what she wants to do... I took the opportunity to do the auntie thing and give her aunt-advice.

College is so discipline oriented, meaning you decide on the discipline you want to study and spend four + years becoming an expert in THAT. But the real world is multi-disciplinary. It's usually after you get out of college and into the real world that you discover what you might actually enjoy doing and the skills that give you the most satisfaction using. There's a big difference (or there can be) between a major subject and the application of that subject in the real world. And ones idea of what a subject "means" or how it is applied can be very skewed. My own ideas were very simplistic. My friends also thought of their majors fairly simplistically. You performed or your taught or you were the artist, but nobody thinks of being a consultant to a museum, for instance... Kids approaching college plans do not usually think of these kinds of complex applications.. and by extenstion, where their degree might actually take them.

I have started to think that experience is the real teacher. how can we really know what we want to do without trying a few things? ...I had to restrain myself from telling her that it might be good to hold off college for a few years, work, live (oh yeah, must get that drivers license first), and see what things really pull you to know more, do more, be the person you want to be... Well, I did not tell her to go into the Peace Corp--my SIL would probably kill me-- I fully expect that the pressures to go to college and get a degree will not go away. Right now, she is using a process of elimination. She doesn't like math, she doesn't want to teach, she doesn't want to get a liberal arts degree only to be qualified for nothing but teaching... (that may be my BIL talking).

It's an interesting question: how do you figure out what you want to do and what you need education/training for. It's a process, I tell her. We tell her, she's ahead of the game for exploring and not yet knowing... we shall see.