What Do you want to be when you grow up?

by Sarah Lenker

What do you want to be when you grow up? When approached by an adult, this is one of the first questions they tend ask children of all ages, from 4 to 18 (and occasionally the 25 year old still living in his mother’s basement.)

And the responses are quite varied. Generally, the younger the child, the more outlandish their answer. I remember the first time someone asked my what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was in preschool. And my answer? I wanted to be a toy. Hey, no one told me there was no demand for this job.

The problem with asking children this question, though, is that while it can provide some amusing answers from young children, it causes only stress and anxiety in older teenagers- those who will soon be faced with the important decision of what career field to enter. This question works under the assumption that all children know what they want to do from a young age, and that their answer is set in stone. However, as most adults know, this isn’t the case. A study done by Linkedin found that adults changed jobs an average of 15 times throughout their lives. 15 times. This shows that many people end up changing their career goals throughout college and the rest of their life, as they constantly adapt into new versions of themselves with new values, goals, and aspirations (Marker 2015). By forcing a teenager to choose a career, you are giving them the unrealistic expectation that their future is set in stone.

As high school students, we are presented with an infinite number of doors leading to an infinite number of careers, and we are told that the key to our future unlocks only one. However, this could not be farther from the truth. Society tells students they must find their passion in while in school, and that a career in this field will make them happy. There are many reasons this idea is naive. For one, most people don’t have a singular passion- and passions grow and develop over time. Someone who enters the career field loathing their career may find their love for it grows over time.

As the London School of Business and Finance found, 68 percent of 18-24 year olds wish to change careers, but this number drops at a constant level. In general, the older participants, the less amount that wish to change jobs (Burn-Callander 2015). However, the contrary is also possible. People may enter into a career following what they love, only to find growing resentment for their hobby. Even if a person loves their hobbies enough to pursue them as a career, they may find the careers available are few and far between. I mean, look at me. Most people see me with my camera and assume that my singular passion is photography.

However, I love many other things too: coffee, traveling, stories, and helping people, to name a few. I am just lucky enough that many of these things line up into a potential career in photojournalism. For many people, though, the things they enjoy don’t translate into good careers. Even if they do, turning your passions into a career can just cause you to resent the thing you once enjoyed, as you are forced to treat it less like a hobby and more as tedious work.

A young adult with a high school education and eighteen years of life experience barely knows anything about the world (I’m speaking from experience here) and a school’s course curriculum barely exposes them to potential career options. While college can offer these experiences and help a teenager narrow their choices, if their high school lacks a variety of courses, they may be missing out on a career they would end up loving. For example, my school offers no engineering courses. Now, I want to go to school for photography, but had I been given the chance to study engineering in high school, I may have found that I really enjoyed it, and chosen to study this in college instead. A recent study found that students who enrolled in more Career and Technical classes in high school, classes designed to expose them to production and maintenance careers, were 3.2 percent more likely to graduate from high school and .6 percent more likely to enroll in a two year college, with a better idea of the career field they wished to enter (Dougherty 2016). Without these course options in high schools, many students are lost when it comes to choosing a major in college. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Education, about 30 percent of students in college for a bachelor’s or associate’s degree end up changing majors at least once (Leu 2017).

Thus, expecting a teenager to plan out their entire career before even entering college is a dangerous expectation. Instead, it is an adults’ job to create an open environment for these children, and to talk freely about their own troubles when choosing a career. We must disband the expectation that teenagers must choose their career before they even turn eighteen, and give them the freedom to explore different career options without the pressure on settling on one for the rest of their life.