[M. K. Thompson]Making a career `choice`

Some people are lucky. They know exactly what they want to do with their lives. But most students enter high school, and even college, undecided about their future.

Choosing a career or major may seem like one of the biggest, hardest, and most important decisions of your life. But choosing a career is not a choice you will make once. It is a series of choices that you will make throughout your life.

Your choice of career will reflect your priorities. All careers - and majors - will require some sort of compromise between initial investment in training; salary; excitement; quality of life; opportunities for personal and professional growth; and opportunities for advancement. But what most students forget to think about is that they are not the same person at 16 that they will be at 26, 36, or 66. You, yourself, will change based upon your experiences in life and your priorities will change too. Getting married or having children, for example, may permanently change your outlook on your career and everything else.

The field that you have chosen will not be the same at the beginning and end of your career. In 1960, one of the freshman engineering classes would have been drafting. Today, students learn computer aided drawing (CAD) and solid modeling instead. Engineering calculations half a century ago were largely done with slide rules. The accuracy of those calculations was usually within 5%. Today, students don`t know what a slide rule is. Their wrist watches have more memory than the average supercomputer did. And their calculations are performed to far more significant figures than they need or can trust.

Finally, the world as you know it is not the world as it will be. In the past 150 years, transportation has gone from horse and cart and great sailing ships, to rail, automobiles, nuclear submarines, aircraft, and space craft. Your grandparents probably either grew up with an ice box in their kitchen or nothing at all. Now college students have mini-fridges in their dormitories. 100 years ago, teenagers in the US graduated from high school, got a job, and held that job until retirement. Now, the average U.S. citizen can expect to change jobs at least 10 times and change their career at least 3 times during their lifetime.

"The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry." So do career choices. No one can predict the future: not the future of your industry, and not the future of the world. You will have to change and adapt yourself and your career to the changes around you. This is good news in many ways. It means that any decision you make today probably won`t permanently ruin your chances for a happy and healthy career. This, in turn, reduces the pressure to make the "right" choice in high school or even in college.

But it also means that it may take years to find your true calling. Your initial career choice(s) will be based on your existing knowledge and experience. Most teenagers know a little bit about careers that they have seen on TV, about what the subjects they have studied in school, about what they have done in extra-curricular activities, and about their parents` careers. But few high school students have had the opportunity to learn about fields like architecture, accounting, engineering, materials science, management, manufacturing, or urban planning.

To find the right career, you may need to continue to explore other fields and options in college, in graduate or professional school, through internships, or as part of your job. Volunteer positions and continuing education or extension school classes are also good opportunities to gain new experiences and learn about new fields.

Be careful when evaluating your experiences. It can be easy to form a negative impression of a field based on incomplete information. College courses are often nothing like courses that you took in high school. Work in your field is sometimes nothing like the things you did in college. And work environments vary widely between different companies in the same field. Instead, try to find out what is fundamentally a good or poor fit for you.

Finally, if you do have to change careers remember that the knowledge, skills, and experiences that you have gained from previous education or jobs add to your value as an employee. Your knowledge of engineering can help with medical research. Your experience in medicine can help with public policy. Your understanding of public policy can help a career in law.

In the end, life is about choice. Choose carefully. Reevaluate often.



Mary Kathryn Thompson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She can be reached at mkthompson@an.kaist.ac.kr. - Ed.