Guidance

It recently occurred to me that the vast majority of the career advice/guidance I received as a teenager were given to me not because the adult (usually a teacher) thought the thing they were advising me to do would be a good fit for me, but rather because they had the general idea that more people should do it.

I had teachers tell me I should go to college instead of automatically opting for university - and this even after I'd found the right program for me (which happened to be a university program). I think they were trying to address the fact that a lot of students in general feel like they "should" go to university, like it's the "right thing to do", even if it isn't a good fit. But I'm very well-suited to university, and this should have been obvious to anyone who he taught me (and all these college-encouragers were people who had taught me). Even if I hadn't found my niche in translation, I would have wandered contentedly through university pulling in A's until I stumbled upon linguistics and completed my degree there, then ended up in an on-campus admin job, using my tuition waiver to do graduate work part-time. Not a perfect fit, but I wouldn't know better and it would certainly be better than doing some very specific college program I have no interest in ("Do travel and tourism! You're good at languages!" "Do dental hygiene! It pays well!") But these grown-ups - teachers who had taught me and knew that I was strong academically - just blindly advised me to go to college without a thought to my strengths to mitigate the fact that students in general feel pressured to go to university.

Once I had chosen translation, one of the guidance counsellors kept encouraging me to go to her alma mater. It was not a good fit. The only way a first-year student could get a single res room in that university was to join a religiously-affiliated college (and she knew that I'm an introverted atheist). It was quite a long way from home compared with other translation programs, and I was very nervous about moving out on my own. And, as it turned out, the program was dying. It closed down in what would have been my graduation year. It was, for multiple reasons, the worst of my possible options. And yet this guidance counsellor encouraged me to this specific program over the others because it was her alma mater and I think someone at some point asked her to promote it.

When I was a teenager, it was fashionable to encourage girls to go into engineering. As a girl and a gifted student, I was made to do all these programs to expose me to engineering. The more I did, the more I disliked it. The thing about engineering is you have to make actual real stuff that actually works in real life. I'm not good at that - I'm clumsy and abstract and not terribly physical or kinesthetic. I'm more of an ideas person, which is why I have a blog category called Things They Should Invent rather than having a dozen patents to my name. But they kept "encouraging" me towards engineering, culminating in a teacher telling me (after I already had chosen translation) that I should go into engineering to show other girls that they can do whatever they want. There was no thought given to the fact that it wasn't a good match for me, they just pushed me in that direction because I was the target demographic.

You might be thinking, "So why are you complaining about this? You got bad advice, you ignored it, you found your path." Yes, but I found my path by a total fluke. If life had gone normally, I would have been entirely trusting these grown-ups' advice on how to pick a post-secondary program and find a career. After all, they'd all done it, I hadn't. It's just like how as a teenager you look to your elders to for advice on how to do a job interview or complete a tax return or parallel park. They knew me well enough that they should have seen the unsuitability of this advice (they're teachers who had taught me multiple times - often in very small classes - and supervised my extracurriculars, in a small high school, near the end of my five-year high school career). I trusted them to give me advice that appropriately took into consideration the things that I knew they knew about me. But instead they shrugged off my concerns. You don't want to go to college? That's just because you're biased - college doesn't mean you're stupid, you know! You don't want to go to my alma mater? You should, it's a good school, you know! You don't want to go into engineering? Don't worry, girls can do engineering too!

This makes me wonder how many kids are out there right now receiving completely unsuitable guidance.

The other thing that surprises me now that I think about it is the number of grown-ups who encouraged me to follow their own personal path even though it was unsuitable for me. This surprises me because my instinct is always to guide people away from my own path if I see reasons why it would be unsuitable for them. It would never occur to me when a teenage cousin, for example, is panicking because they don't know what to do with their life to nudge them towards my path on the mere basis that it exists or that I'm familiar with it. So I find it really odd that I've encountered so many people whose instincts in this area are the opposite of mine.