2008 Woodie Awards
Making tough decisions
Are college students unprepared?
Andrea Robertson
Issue date: 4/3/08 Section: Opinion
In high school, a good portion of us probably thought we knew what we wanted to do for the rest of our lives. However, upon entering college many of us discovered that we were entirely unprepared to make life-altering decisions.
No one ever made us seriously consider the amount of time it would take to discover one's ideal career choice or the amount of hard work it takes to obtain a degree and find a job.
Career choices have become extremely specialized, which causes a problem for a generation that appears to be too unprepared to make tough decisions about life.
Higher education begins for most at the age of 18 (you're an adult, but no one wants to treat you like one). More than likely, you're thrown into a different city largely populated by people you have never met before, and you're expected to decide almost instantly what you want to do with the rest of your life.
It's true that you don't declare your major during your first years of college, but it is ideal to pick a course of study. You're handed off to an undergraduate advisor, who coaches you into entering the major you hope is the right choice, just to discover you probably don't want to do what you initially thought.
The problem arises in the school system. Before college, you had very few choices. High school merely required a person to decide whether he wanted to pass or fail. Because we don't learn to make difficult decisions before we are forced into the real world, we make hasty decisions that either lead to us changing our major or ending up in a career that we don't like.
In high school, due to the lack of specialized classes that could better direct us to the career choice best suited for us or to the lack of serious decision-making in our early to late teens, college students are slowly becoming "Van Wilders."
It's not uncommon to find a fifth or sixth-year senior, and most of the time the reason for being in college longer is because we haven't figured out what we want to do with our lives.
No one ever made us seriously consider the amount of time it would take to discover one's ideal career choice or the amount of hard work it takes to obtain a degree and find a job.
Career choices have become extremely specialized, which causes a problem for a generation that appears to be too unprepared to make tough decisions about life.
Higher education begins for most at the age of 18 (you're an adult, but no one wants to treat you like one). More than likely, you're thrown into a different city largely populated by people you have never met before, and you're expected to decide almost instantly what you want to do with the rest of your life.
It's true that you don't declare your major during your first years of college, but it is ideal to pick a course of study. You're handed off to an undergraduate advisor, who coaches you into entering the major you hope is the right choice, just to discover you probably don't want to do what you initially thought.
The problem arises in the school system. Before college, you had very few choices. High school merely required a person to decide whether he wanted to pass or fail. Because we don't learn to make difficult decisions before we are forced into the real world, we make hasty decisions that either lead to us changing our major or ending up in a career that we don't like.
In high school, due to the lack of specialized classes that could better direct us to the career choice best suited for us or to the lack of serious decision-making in our early to late teens, college students are slowly becoming "Van Wilders."
It's not uncommon to find a fifth or sixth-year senior, and most of the time the reason for being in college longer is because we haven't figured out what we want to do with our lives.
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