Sending Your Millennial to College by John Bader

Author:John Bader
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2018-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Forgive a Poor Choice

A final advantage to disentangling major choices from career options is that your daughter or son won’t worry so much about making the wrong choice. This guidebook and Dean’s List, you will find as you read Strategies #8 and #9, spend time considering failure. I want every student to succeed, of course, but I know the reality is that many do not. For a variety of reasons, they make poor choices. Sometimes, they made those choices with you or to please you. However independent they are, they can make decisions that put them in harm’s way, experiencing coursework that is too difficult or uninteresting, with faculty who are not helpful or disconnected.

And they can choose the wrong major. They might do this because of pressure or reputation. They might have been good at a subject like chemistry in high school, but college-level studies turn out to be very different and disappointing. Things can go wrong along the way—introductory classes were appealing but upper-level requirements prove unexciting or unsuccessful. At Johns Hopkins University, I knew many students whose interests cooled over time or they encountered a really difficult required course. It happens, and you cope or change direction, depending on the severity.

These challenges are difficult enough to carry without worrying that career options have been cut off or destroyed. Tying a major to a career puts expectations on a major that failure cannot tolerate. If you had to major in biology to enjoy career success, and then biology is a bust, where are you? You can suffer through biology, taking courses you hate and earning grades that damage your transcript and future prospects—a seriously shortsighted approach that parents should not support—or choose an “impractical” major that condemns you to professional failure. This is a no-win situation, created by the thought that a particular major is a requirement for a happy career.

Do not enable this kind of thinking. Allow your son or daughter the freedom to choose coursework and majors in which they will succeed. Do not force them to be practical or career-savvy based on your impression of what fits those criteria. With freedom and lowered expectations of a major’s purpose, they can choose as best they can. And if that choice turns out to be a mistake, they know they can recover, find a new course, and keep their career options open and strong.

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