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> After you get out of high school you should choose a vocationally oriented educational institution to learn about whatever specialized field you've chosen I

> After you get out of high school you should choose a vocationally oriented educational institution to learn about whatever specialized field you've chosen I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree. So now she is applying to graduate programs. Frankly, none of my kids college bound friends knew what they wanted to do until they were almost graduated. It seems to me that many of us learn what we want to do by being exposed to many different things in the college environment. But it takes years and sort of floundering to figure that out.

voisin 4y ago
> I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree. This is why I strongly advocate for taking a gap year - or 2 or 5. Kids need experience - broad real world experience being exposed to lots of different things - in order to determine what turns their crank and rises to the level that they (a) know what they are getting into and (b) actually want to do it for (possibly) the rest of their lives. This focus on moving from birth to career in one unbroken path increases the odds that people commit the sunk cost fallacy - with their life! - continuing to pursue something only because they started doing so without really knowing themselves. What a silly waste of this one and only magical life.
- irrational 4y ago
  I actually did take a 2 year gap before starting college (I was a few months shy of 28 years old when I graduated with my masters). It didn’t help.
wink 4y ago
But the opposite is also kinda true. I was pretty sure that I wanted to do software when I was 15 and then I had to sit through a lot more stuff to be able to study that, that was basically my main motivator to finish our equivalent of high school (bit more complicated here in Germany, to be able to go to uni I had to finish my 13 years of schools, or go a very complicated route of exiting school at 16, do a 3 year vocational training (that could have been application development), to go back to school for 1-2 years, with no time saved. But yeah, could've just done work then and not go to uni, but I wanted to learn).
munk-a 4y ago
I think, and this is all set in the very different educational system, that if there was an education track purely devoted to vocational learning that it'd be perfectly socially acceptable to delay enrolling until it's relevant to you or to re-enroll later if you'd benefit from different vocational skills. I'm a CS major myself but when I first entered university I was pursuing a degree in statistics and had hardly done any computer programming at all in high school - I was computer literate and played plenty of games but programming had never been accessible or interesting until I started using SASS and then moved on to more powerful languages.

voisin 4y ago

> I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree. This is why I strongly advocate for taking a gap year - or 2 or 5. Kids need experience - broad real world experience being exposed to lots of different things - in order to determine what turns their crank and rises to the level that they (a) know what they are getting into and (b) actually want to do it for (possibly) the rest of their lives. This focus on moving from birth to career in one unbroken path increases the odds that people commit the sunk cost fallacy - with their life! - continuing to pursue something only because they started doing so without really knowing themselves. What a silly waste of this one and only magical life.

irrational 4y ago
I actually did take a 2 year gap before starting college (I was a few months shy of 28 years old when I graduated with my masters). It didn’t help.

wink 4y ago

But the opposite is also kinda true. I was pretty sure that I wanted to do software when I was 15 and then I had to sit through a lot more stuff to be able to study that, that was basically my main motivator to finish our equivalent of high school (bit more complicated here in Germany, to be able to go to uni I had to finish my 13 years of schools, or go a very complicated route of exiting school at 16, do a 3 year vocational training (that could have been application development), to go back to school for 1-2 years, with no time saved. But yeah, could've just done work then and not go to uni, but I wanted to learn).

munk-a 4y ago

I think, and this is all set in the very different educational system, that if there was an education track purely devoted to vocational learning that it'd be perfectly socially acceptable to delay enrolling until it's relevant to you or to re-enroll later if you'd benefit from different vocational skills. I'm a CS major myself but when I first entered university I was pursuing a degree in statistics and had hardly done any computer programming at all in high school - I was computer literate and played plenty of games but programming had never been accessible or interesting until I started using SASS and then moved on to more powerful languages.