This month our blog was written by Kelly Briggs, First Year College Advisor at Great Basin College (GBC).
What do you want to do when you grow up? We start asking children that question when they are far too young to know the answer. At 5 years old, what professions did you know about? Teacher, doctor, firefighter, police officer, and someone who wears suits. How can we possibly expect a child to answer these questions? All we are really doing is introducing the idea that a person is their job – and that shouldn’t be the message children grow up with.
Fast forward 10 years and we slightly change the question for high school students – what are you going to study at college? Different question, same problem. With some institutions of higher education offering over 250 different majors, how can a 15 year old be expected to answer this question? And why should they? Very few 15 year olds can be expected to know what they want to do for the next 5 days, let alone 5 years. Not only that – ‘college’ covers a lot of territory and can mean a lot of different things.
Eventually we change the question to ‘what do you want to do for the rest of your life?’ Like they are only allowed to choose one thing and that they are not allowed to grow and change over the course of their lives. Of course they are stressed out and anxious about their future and afraid of commitment. In reality, most people change not only jobs, but entire career fields. Gone are the days where you get an entry level job at a company and rise through the ranks until you retire 40 years later – for most people at least.
New jobs and fields are created all the time. In the first paragraph, I wrote ‘someone who wears suits’. That used to be a banker, but people rarely go to the bank and stand in line to talk to the teller anymore. Banker simply isn’t a job that children automatically think about anymore. Social media didn’t exist when I was growing up (yes, I’m that old), but now it is a source of a lot of different kinds of jobs and careers. It is quite likely that their dream job may not exist yet!
Let’s change the messaging. Let’s let children be children and play, explore, find out who they are. Let’s let teenagers learn the skills they will need throughout their lives – no matter what job they have. Let’s help them explore their interests and values to find out what is important to them. What is most important is the person they become – not the job that they get.
So, what should our message be to children? GEAR UP nails it. Dream. Believe. Achieve.
