Once your teen has chosen the college or university of their choice, been accepted, and arranged for financing of their education, the time will come that they will need to pick their major. Although this final step can sometimes take a bit longer, eventually they will have to focus on their area of study. Fortunately, there are many tools to help your teen pick the right degree for them.
Tools to Help Your Teen Pick a Great Degree
Your teen’s high school will probably run at least one career fair while they are still in attendance. While these are useful in helping them see how many careers are possible, they do little to help students find the right fit. Help guide your teen through a process of self-discovery with these tools:
1. Repeat Their Exposure to What Interests Them
Anytime your teen expresses interest in a particular career, see that they get repeated exposure to it. This way, they can get to the actual how and why of their passion for a particular field of study. For example, aspiring journalists might be thrilled by a tour of a newspaper office or TV news station set.
However, are they as excited if they get to explore it a second time? Many potential careers look thrilling at first glance, but spending time with a mentor can help them actually look under the hood and see if there’s a particular reason driving them in that direction.
2. Journaling for Self-Reflection
Your teen won’t be able to spend physical time exploring a career every day of the week, but they can do journaling every day. Just 10 to 30 minutes of writing notes to themselves about a possible career can help them at least formulate questions they would want answers to or problems they might want to solve in the world.
It’s sometimes too much to expect a 16-year-old to plan out their whole life, but they should at least have some inner instinct urging them towards certain activities or occupations over others. Journaling is a chance for those intuitions to be put into words and then into action.
3. Emphasize Curiosity Over Impatience
Most colleges and universities have largely the same curriculum the first few semesters. Your teen might have a year or so of higher education before they have to declare their major without risking adding additional time to their education.
Life moves fast in the teen years, so help your teen find a way to slow down and just explore what they are curious about rather than feel like they need to rush through a process of elimination and find ‘the’ career right for them. Internships and volunteer opportunities of all kinds can help.
4. Forget That You’re a Parent
You can never truly detach yourself from being a parent, but in this instance, you can help your teen the most by remembering that they are not a parent. They might not even become one. This particular mental tool is to look at potential degrees and careers only in the sense that they are what’s right for your teen.
Don’t try to guide your teen towards career paths that might have stability, income, and benefits for their future family. That might greatly impact what you do for a living right now, but your unborn grandkids shouldn’t even be a part of the career conversation for your teen. By analyzing college completion rates, it’s apparent that whatever field your child decides to pursue, it’s critical that they enjoy it in order to thrive and succeed.
5. Money Matters
Discovering personal passions is crucial for teens who want to have a chance to do something they love. Then again, they also need to be able to support themselves. The tension between looking for happiness or financial security is a common refrain in many families, and if you’re personally financing some or all of your teen’s college, then you might feel like you have some say in the matter.
The best thing to do is to find career paths that have overlap between income potential and personal satisfaction for your teen. Money will always be a factor, but it should never be the only one that counts.
6. Get Advice From The Experts
Parents want what is best for their children, which often means helping them choose a degree that will lead to a successful and fulfilling career. However, with the ever-changing workforce landscape, it can be challenging to know what path to steer your teen down. Nevertheless, there are a few general tips that can help to guide them in the right direction. For example, on-campus associate and bachelor’s programs tend to be more traditional and offer a well-rounded education. They also typically provide internship and job placement opportunities, which can be helpful for teens who are unsure of what they want to do after graduation. Another way to get reliable advice is to speak with someone who has experience working with on-campus associate and bachelor’s programs. They can help you understand the benefits and drawbacks of each type of program and assist you in making an informed decision about what is best for your child. In addition, they can guide how to navigate the admissions process and connect you with resources that can help your teen succeed in college and beyond. With the help of an experienced advisor, you can give your teen the best chance at finding success in their post-secondary education.
Degrees With High Income Potential
If your teen seems interested in making good money as a young adult while leaving open the possibility of finding themselves later on down the road, there are certain degrees that have high-income potential and can possibly still be good careers to explore:
Medicine
People with a medical degree typically make more money than most lawyers. Being a doctor might seem like a stressful lifestyle, but some specializations work banker’s hours, such as dermatologists. Your teen wouldn’t even necessarily have to be a doctor to take advantage of the many job openings and high pay that the healthcare industry has to offer.
From being a certified professional midwife to becoming an electrical technician, there are many different lines of work that pay well and carry the satisfaction of helping people stay healthy. Bringing new lives into the world is a joy that is unlike any other.
Technical Degrees
A world that is getting increasingly technical needs experts to keep it moving and progressing. Telecommunication engineers are in high demand right now as a particular niche. There might be an abundance of software engineers, but there might not be enough chemical engineers. Technical writing is very much in demand in many industries in the digital age. Written communication and quality documentation are a must in the modern world.
Business
Many working adults go back to school for an MBA, but just an undergraduate business degree is great in the entrepreneurial age of startups. Starting and running a business might be necessary for your teen to support themselves if it takes longer to find their passion. Likewise, it can also support them while they work on their personal passion and figure out how to successfully monetize it.
Be Helpful Without Guiding Them
You want what’s best for your teen, and that can make helping them find the right degree hard to do. Always help them discover what’s right for them, but don’t nudge them towards or away from any particular choices. The Balance recommends not foisting your own dreams or ambitions on your teen. In an age where potentially 90 percent of the workforce is unhappy with their current line of work, your teen needs to pick something that they truly love and believe in.
If you want to be adamant about anything in their education, it might be learning a second language. Bilingual employees are in demand in nearly every sector and industry, so fluency or knowledge of another spoken language can easily translate into considerably more income over the course of their career. This has the potential to earn them extra income early on, too.
Choosing the right degree can be perhaps more important than the actual school your teen gets into. By using these tools, you can help your teen choose something right for them. It’s important to have passion in everything they do.
