Choosing what you would like to do for the rest of your life can be pretty overwhelming for most students. The idea that, as a high school student, you are expected to decide what career you will enjoy doing every day can seem scary. One of my students described his view of the future as endless 40 hour work weeks and while there is certainly some truth to his statement, the goal is that you will find a career that you love. When you enjoy your job and find it fulfilling and rewarding then every day will give you something meaningful. (Hopefully it will be a job you love and not something that you feel forced into or because you don't have any other options.) It is fun to dream about your future and I hope you will ultimately find a job that is as meaningful to you as my job as a high school counselor is to me!
So, tomorrow, there are a few hints that I wanted to give to you to help make your morning beneficial and effective.
First and foremost, please plan ahead on when you leave your house because traffic will be BAD! It will be significantly worse than on any regular school day because we will have more than 200 extra cars coming to WKHS who aren't normally driving there.
My next suggestion is to EXPLORE! You don't know what you don't know. Walk up and talk to the different career professionals. Ask them the best and worst parts of their jobs. Find out how they ended up in that field. You never know what you might learn about a different job opportunity that you had never even considered previously.
Talk to the professionals! Yes, that may seem obvious, but if you just walk past their table and look at them without actually talking to them, you will have missed out on a great opportunity. If you have already finished talking to the people in the fields that were most interesting to you, then please be kind and thoughtful hosts to our guests - pick someone's table that doesn't have anyone visiting them and go up and talk to them so that they feel welcomed and appreciated by our students.
When thinking about areas that interest you, don't judge just based upon category! As the career professionals were selecting their career fields it was interesting to see how much overlap there could be in different areas. (So, for example, an engineer who functions in a management position might have selected Business as their job category and not Engineering so if you wanted to talk to all of the engineers, you would also want to talk to him in the Business area. Or another business representative might work in healthcare so they listed their career as being Healthcare.) The bottom line is there are LOTS of people at WKHS so make sure you walk around and try to find all of the people who have jobs which might interest you even if they are not where you would have expected to find them.
If you do not have any idea what you would like to do with your future, please don't panic. As I mentioned, explore and talk to people it might help you start generating ideas and thinking about what you might enjoy. You can also do some career interest inventories. These are available for free on a website called Ohio Means Jobs K-12. If you go to the website ohiomeansjobs.com and click on "Individuals" and then click on the "K-12" icon it will allow you to get started. There is a career interest inventory and a career profiler that both allow you to answer questions about yourself and your interests (or lack thereof) and it then gives you feedback about fields that might be good areas to consider based upon your interests.
I hope you have a great time at tomorrow's career fair. And thank you again to all of the students who helped set up today and will be volunteering their time bright and early tomorrow morning at 6:45am!
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