No Career Counseling


When you are a kid (school kid or college kid), you look at different professions from a certain perspective, a kid’s perspective. And since most of us never have a chance to talk things out with a real (let alone good) career counselor, we end up making choices without fully understanding what life in that profession will be like. Which is almost tragic, given that the choice impacts the rest of your adult life.

So I wonder why career counseling isn’t more into telling kids what a profession is like. Like telling them an engineering degree is valid across countries. Or that people skills are critical to being a doctor, not just being good at academics. Or that a medical degree isn’t valid across countries, and even requires periodic re-certification if they plan to go settle in the West. Or that a lawyer’s life is tough (in India) unless you have family or other connections in that field already. Or that an MBA in marketing would create lots of travel (not all to glamorous areas) and hence would be tougher for a woman post-marriage and kids.

Instead we end up focusing on just the college and the degree, because that usually translates into money. How many counselors tell kids that many other professions can give you decent money as well? Come to think of it, how many counselors even talk money with kids?

Just asking one’s teachers is not always a good option because, as Roger Schank puts it “Calculus is not a career choice”. And parents often won’t know too many fields either. We need good, dedicated counselors. But is there any sign we will get them?

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarSeptember 30, 2012 at 10:31 AM

    Yes I agree that there is a need for this. As things stand, in our schools we advise career counselling only to those kids who seem to have difficulty in making it to the streams/subjects of their choice or their parents' choice! For instance, if a student does not get admission to either the science or commerce streams, she/he would be advised to talk to the counsellor about options that will open up even if the student settles for the humanities option.Such a pity!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more