I’m 17 and going to my final year of high school in January. I’m having some trouble making up my mind about what to do after high school and would appreciate some help with this.
I’ve skimmed a few books on career choice but they all just spout platitudes. I don’t think I should do “What Interests Me” because I think I’d become bored of almost anything after a few weeks. I don’t think I should do what I’m “talented” at because I doubt talents are specific enough to narrow down career-space enough. (Yes, a person might have high g and thus be good at computer programming, but that same high g would aid them as much with lots of other careers—why choose programming specifically?) Even if talents were specific enough, I don’t think my self-assessments of what my talents are are even nearly accurate enough to base the next 50+ years of my life on them.
It’s pretty obvious that most people have no idea what they’re doing when they choose a career. So what should I base a career choice on?
You may be in a different situation than I was, but I personally wish I had read Study Hacks or some of Cal Newport’s books when I was in your situation. Lots of clear, actionable advice for building a remarkable college career, no platitudes. Email him at author [at] calnewport.com if you have a specific question, he’ll answer you (eventually).
Good luck! It can be stressful when you don’t know what to do, but developing one’s career can be great fun. You’re building your legacy and learning how to make your mark. It’s awesome!
Have you thought about trying to become a serial entrepreneur?
You won’t likely get bored—entrepreneurs typically have to play many roles since they are the 1st employees of the companies they start. If you’re still afraid you’ll get bored, you could make each company you start be in a different industry, getting a job in that industry before you start the company in order to acquire industry knowledge and spot inefficiencies. (Consider reading this book to learn about various industries.)
Perhaps most importantly, if you make more money than you know what to do with, you can become a philanthropist and have a larger positive impact on the course of world history than is possible with most careers. (Even if you want to have a large positive impact on world history using some other method, such as by being a good politician, you’ll likely find having a ton of money to be really helpful. The main world changing career that doesn’t benefit highly from having a ton of money is the academic/public intellectual one, which has its own perilious “graduate student” advancement track.)
If you find this idea interests you, I recommend reading a few of the books on the personal MBA reading list. I think you’ll be surprised by just how unintelligent and irrational the median entrepreneur is, including the median successful entrepreneur. As far as I can tell, the only thing all entrepreneurs have in common is fearlessness, which is a prerequisite (and quite possible to develop, I’m happy to elaborate on how I developed fearlessness in myself). Then the successful ones have things like intelligence, domain knowledge, and inclination to work hard.
Regarding programming in particular, it’s a very useful skill to have regardless of whether you go into it as a career. Being able to write software will allow you to optimize your computer use, and learning is quite a mind expanding experience.
And based on my research from when I was choosing a major, software engineering is basically the best career achievable for someone who only has a 4 year degree. The combination of job outlook (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2905410), salary, working conditions, and interestingness of work is very hard to beat, especially if you have chops and you’re willing to move to Silicon Valley. (The only downside is that keeping up with the constantly changing field can be difficult as you grow older.) My runner up choices would be mining engineers, who, based on my limited research, get paid a lot of money to travel the world and blow things up, and police officers, who make quite a bit of money and retire early with a pension in certain US localities.
Choosing a career for the next 50 years of your life now is a fallacy. For modern workers, midlife career changes are the norm, not the exception. If you really don’t know what to do, choose the highest paying job you can find without upgrading your lifestyle so you’ll have more options down the road.
Sorry for the delayed reply. I’ve never seriously considered becoming an entrepreneur, so your post is very useful and may even significantly change the rest of my life. I need to do a lot more research about all this. Those links are also really helpful; Paul Graham’s essay makes lots of sense.
My plan at the moment is to settle on some vague life plan. I’m not nearly competent enough yet to go off and start a business or get a job, so I think my plan at the moment, if said “vague life plan” is to become an entrepreneur, is to finish high school and then go to some university. While I’m doing that I’ll be learning more about entrepreneurship and other useful skills, then decide where to go from there.
Very few people know what career they want when they’re seventeen. Of those people, a significant proportion end up either doing a different job or displeased by their choice.
This is what I did; it may or may not work for you. Go to a college with a wide variety of class choices and highlight everything in the course book that looks interesting and that you have the prereqs for. Narrow it down to four or five classes by eliminating courses that occur in the same time block as another course you’re more interested in, courses with dull or unintelligent teachers, or courses that come from disciplines you’ve already taken a lot of classes in. (Note: if you have general course requirements, take those courses.) That should give you some data to eliminate majors you’re absolutely not interested in; for the rest, assuming you have not gotten an all-consuming obsession with one particular field, look at the BLS statistics to see which one has the best overall job outcomes (income, hours worked, unemployment risk, etc) and major in that one.
General warnings: unlike most people here, I am not a STEM major; my experience applies strictly to the social sciences and the humanities. I also have not attempted to get a job in this economy, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
Related idea: look through the course catalog for the course prerequisite chains that are the longest (they will probably be for math, chemistry, and physics). Take the 1st course in each of the longest chains early on in your college career so you’ll know right away if one of the long-chain majors is for you (as opposed to a few years later, when it will be too late to make the switch).
I’ve skimmed a few books on career choice but they all just spout platitudes.
Talk to your high school’s guidance counselor. They should have a few aptitude tests that you might find useful (like this short one).
It’s pretty obvious that most people have no idea what they’re doing when they choose a career. So what should I base a career choice on?
Think of a career as the way in which you provide value to others. The most important word in that sentence is ‘you, then ‘others’. Figuring out what your personality is and what your mental skills are is the best springboard. (And mental skills are way more than “g”- there’s a lot of variation in mental architecture among people.)
I’ve taken tests like that in the past. They seem useful for narrowing things down, but what frustrates me is that they make recommendations based on things you shouldn’t be using to make long-term recommendations. For instance, the test you linked to asks about level of interest in art, business, law, computers, etc.. I don’t want to spend the next 50 years of my life in neuroscience because I happened to have a crush on biology in high-school.
I mentioned g because it’s important for career choice and it seems unlikely to change much, unlike other things like social skills, programming skill, or self-control, which can be learned (and should be learned if some brief learning is needed for a long-term better career).
I’m 17 and going to my final year of high school in January. I’m having some trouble making up my mind about what to do after high school and would appreciate some help with this.
I’ve skimmed a few books on career choice but they all just spout platitudes. I don’t think I should do “What Interests Me” because I think I’d become bored of almost anything after a few weeks. I don’t think I should do what I’m “talented” at because I doubt talents are specific enough to narrow down career-space enough. (Yes, a person might have high g and thus be good at computer programming, but that same high g would aid them as much with lots of other careers—why choose programming specifically?) Even if talents were specific enough, I don’t think my self-assessments of what my talents are are even nearly accurate enough to base the next 50+ years of my life on them.
It’s pretty obvious that most people have no idea what they’re doing when they choose a career. So what should I base a career choice on?
You may be in a different situation than I was, but I personally wish I had read Study Hacks or some of Cal Newport’s books when I was in your situation. Lots of clear, actionable advice for building a remarkable college career, no platitudes. Email him at author [at] calnewport.com if you have a specific question, he’ll answer you (eventually).
In other news, programming skills are massively valuable and rare in traditionally programming-free disciplines (government, biology, medicine, etc). Learn programming, but you’re much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.
Good luck! It can be stressful when you don’t know what to do, but developing one’s career can be great fun. You’re building your legacy and learning how to make your mark. It’s awesome!
I happen to remember reading a couple of posts of yours, and you strike me as very capable guy.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/61t/what_would_you_do_with_infinite_willpower/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/5xw/training_for_math_olympiads/
Have you thought about trying to become a serial entrepreneur?
You won’t likely get bored—entrepreneurs typically have to play many roles since they are the 1st employees of the companies they start. If you’re still afraid you’ll get bored, you could make each company you start be in a different industry, getting a job in that industry before you start the company in order to acquire industry knowledge and spot inefficiencies. (Consider reading this book to learn about various industries.)
Being an entrepreneur is the archetypical example of a job in which you actually get paid according to how awesome you are.
Perhaps most importantly, if you make more money than you know what to do with, you can become a philanthropist and have a larger positive impact on the course of world history than is possible with most careers. (Even if you want to have a large positive impact on world history using some other method, such as by being a good politician, you’ll likely find having a ton of money to be really helpful. The main world changing career that doesn’t benefit highly from having a ton of money is the academic/public intellectual one, which has its own perilious “graduate student” advancement track.)
If you find this idea interests you, I recommend reading a few of the books on the personal MBA reading list. I think you’ll be surprised by just how unintelligent and irrational the median entrepreneur is, including the median successful entrepreneur. As far as I can tell, the only thing all entrepreneurs have in common is fearlessness, which is a prerequisite (and quite possible to develop, I’m happy to elaborate on how I developed fearlessness in myself). Then the successful ones have things like intelligence, domain knowledge, and inclination to work hard.
Regarding programming in particular, it’s a very useful skill to have regardless of whether you go into it as a career. Being able to write software will allow you to optimize your computer use, and learning is quite a mind expanding experience.
And based on my research from when I was choosing a major, software engineering is basically the best career achievable for someone who only has a 4 year degree. The combination of job outlook (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2905410), salary, working conditions, and interestingness of work is very hard to beat, especially if you have chops and you’re willing to move to Silicon Valley. (The only downside is that keeping up with the constantly changing field can be difficult as you grow older.) My runner up choices would be mining engineers, who, based on my limited research, get paid a lot of money to travel the world and blow things up, and police officers, who make quite a bit of money and retire early with a pension in certain US localities.
Choosing a career for the next 50 years of your life now is a fallacy. For modern workers, midlife career changes are the norm, not the exception. If you really don’t know what to do, choose the highest paying job you can find without upgrading your lifestyle so you’ll have more options down the road.
Sorry for the delayed reply. I’ve never seriously considered becoming an entrepreneur, so your post is very useful and may even significantly change the rest of my life. I need to do a lot more research about all this. Those links are also really helpful; Paul Graham’s essay makes lots of sense.
My plan at the moment is to settle on some vague life plan. I’m not nearly competent enough yet to go off and start a business or get a job, so I think my plan at the moment, if said “vague life plan” is to become an entrepreneur, is to finish high school and then go to some university. While I’m doing that I’ll be learning more about entrepreneurship and other useful skills, then decide where to go from there.
Great to hear that you found my advice useful!
Very few people know what career they want when they’re seventeen. Of those people, a significant proportion end up either doing a different job or displeased by their choice.
This is what I did; it may or may not work for you. Go to a college with a wide variety of class choices and highlight everything in the course book that looks interesting and that you have the prereqs for. Narrow it down to four or five classes by eliminating courses that occur in the same time block as another course you’re more interested in, courses with dull or unintelligent teachers, or courses that come from disciplines you’ve already taken a lot of classes in. (Note: if you have general course requirements, take those courses.) That should give you some data to eliminate majors you’re absolutely not interested in; for the rest, assuming you have not gotten an all-consuming obsession with one particular field, look at the BLS statistics to see which one has the best overall job outcomes (income, hours worked, unemployment risk, etc) and major in that one.
General warnings: unlike most people here, I am not a STEM major; my experience applies strictly to the social sciences and the humanities. I also have not attempted to get a job in this economy, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
Related idea: look through the course catalog for the course prerequisite chains that are the longest (they will probably be for math, chemistry, and physics). Take the 1st course in each of the longest chains early on in your college career so you’ll know right away if one of the long-chain majors is for you (as opposed to a few years later, when it will be too late to make the switch).
Have you seen LessWrong for highschoolers?
Talk to your high school’s guidance counselor. They should have a few aptitude tests that you might find useful (like this short one).
Think of a career as the way in which you provide value to others. The most important word in that sentence is ‘you, then ‘others’. Figuring out what your personality is and what your mental skills are is the best springboard. (And mental skills are way more than “g”- there’s a lot of variation in mental architecture among people.)
I’ve taken tests like that in the past. They seem useful for narrowing things down, but what frustrates me is that they make recommendations based on things you shouldn’t be using to make long-term recommendations. For instance, the test you linked to asks about level of interest in art, business, law, computers, etc.. I don’t want to spend the next 50 years of my life in neuroscience because I happened to have a crush on biology in high-school.
I mentioned g because it’s important for career choice and it seems unlikely to change much, unlike other things like social skills, programming skill, or self-control, which can be learned (and should be learned if some brief learning is needed for a long-term better career).