CareerZing talks with a recent high school graduate from South Florida on how he’s feeling about the transition from high school to university life and selecting a career:

What is the biggest issue on your mind as you transition from high school student to college student?
Because I’m going to a college that is top ranked in my field of study, I’m expecting the standards to be pretty high. I'm a little worried going into college about the difficulty of the courses and the level of competition to get those elusive A's. College represents the best of the best that you had in class in high school, so, in a word, competition is the biggest issue on my mind.

What is your major for now and how certain are you about it?
I want to major in some sort of engineering, but I'm not exactly sure which type yet. If I had to pick right now, I would say Industrial Engineering because I really enjoyed reading the preview materials that the university department gave me, but I am not very certain about it. I'll have to take some introductory classes and see what I'm good at, and then I'll figure it out.

What steps, other than taking classes, do you plan to take to be sure of your career choice?
I will try to get a co-op job at Georgia Tech with a company in my prospective major, and hopefully this work experience will let me know if I will enjoy and succeed at my career choice. If I can do well in the classes and the job, then I can be pretty confident that I have made the right choice.

What kind of support and/or resources did you get throughout your school years so far that helped you begin your career search?
I didn't really talk to my guidance counselor throughout high school, so mostly my classes and extra-curricular activities helped me find the career choices that interested me. I spent three years in the Rocket and Engineering clubs, and I enjoyed both of these activities, so that was what gave me the inspiration to pick engineering as a likely career.

Who has been the most influential person/people in terms of making decisions about the future and why?
I think my teachers have been most influential because they have provided useful feedback to help me figure out which subjects I would be best at. Some of my extracurricular activities were supervised by my teachers, as well, so I quickly got a feel for what I was good at while doing hands on work in that subject.

How do you feel about the lifestyle changes you will experience when you go off to college? What kinds of adjustments do you think you’ll have to make?
The freedom that you have in college is a major change from any previous point in your life, and the responsibilities that go along with that freedom will probably constitute the biggest lifestyle changes that I'll have to make. I'm going to really need to keep track of my work and make sure that distractions don't get in my way. At the same time, though, I think that I'll enjoy the college lifestyle because I can really do things my way. Either way, I'll have to develop some responsibility very quickly.

I’ve been noticing in my interviews with other high school students that there is a high level of anxiety about deciding on a career direction but little dedication given to exploring careers. At such a crucial time for doing just that, why do you think people in this age group spend a relatively small amount of time using their resources to explore a career direction?
I think most kids like me still think of the world as divided into subjects that you learn about, not fields of work, and so even if you know what classes you're good at, you really don't have much practical experience to think about what you can do with a subject. Kids just aren't as interested in careers because they haven't hit the level of education that requires more real-world thinking and advanced concepts. Once the reality of work hits in college, kids will get much more interested in which career they would like to go into.