Key Takeaways
- You don’t need to choose an exact career in high school; you just need to explore possibilities.
- Small experiments and intentional reflection help you discover your interests, strengths, and transferable skills.
- Exploration not only prepares you for future career decisions but also leads to a stronger, more authentic college application.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
It’s a question students hear throughout childhood. By the time high school begins, it can feel like you’re expected to have an answer: not just for conversations with family, but for choosing extracurriculars, selecting a major, and eventually applying to college.
The problem is that most high school students haven’t had enough experiences to make that decision confidently.
Instead of trying to choose your future, make high school about exploring it.
Why Choosing a Career Feels Impossible
It’s hard to know where to start with career exploration when you are still in high school.
When you enter high school, you’ve only experienced a tiny fraction of the working world. Only some high schoolers begin working jobs after sophomore or junior year, but that still doesn’t give them much exposure.
Students might think that they want to become a lawyer, a businessman, or a doctor, but careers can be much different than students imagine. It’s hard for students to accurately compare careers that they’ve never really seen firsthand.
At the same time, your interests can evolve a lot throughout high school. What excites you as a freshman may be completely different by senior year.
Overall, it’s common for students to feel like they’re in the dark about choosing a career path.
But maybe choosing a specific career path may not have even been the point to begin with.
Stop Planning, Start Experimenting
Your goal should not be to pick a specific career in high school; it should be to pick careers you want to explore further.
In high school, you are still learning about your interests and capabilities as a student. Don’t pressure yourself to find a perfect career path while you are still evolving.
Instead, you should test your assumptions.
You might think you’d love medicine, marketing, engineering, or teaching, but until you’ve explored those fields, they’re just assumptions. High school gives you the chance to test them.
Start by assessing yourself. Ask:
- What do I enjoy?
- What am I interested in learning more about?
- What do I want to try?
Once you have a few ideas, don’t jump to conclusions. Run experiments.
Small experiments:
- Read a memoir.
- Watch a day-in-the-life video.
- Attend one club meeting.
- Email a professional.
Bigger experiments:
- Shadow someone.
- Volunteer.
- Start a project.
- Take a course.
These actions may not seem like much at first, but many experiments over time will lead you to make bigger realizations about what you’re actually intrigued in exploring further.
Build Skills Before Your Career
Every experiment teaches you something, even if it doesn’t point you toward your dream career. Some experiments unlock hidden passions, while others might leave you discouraged.
No matter how certain you feel, continue experimenting and exploring. As you do more experiments, you gain experience and build skills that are useful in any future career.
You’ll naturally develop skills like:
- curiosity
- communication
- problem-solving
- critical thinking
Experimentation also highlights your aptitudes: the things you are naturally good at.
And even a “failed” experiment isn’t wasted. Say that a student shadowed a physical therapist one summer and realized that she doesn’t want that career. Beyond ruling out physical therapy as an option, she also gained skills in asking thoughtful questions, communicating professionally, learning how workplaces function, and reflecting on her experience.
Not all your experiments will confirm your assumptions about your interests; some may actually challenge them. But this trial-and-error process of learning what you do and don’t align with will eventually help you narrow down your career options to what’s truly right for you.
How Careers Actually Take Shape
Students might think that their experiments lead to their major, and their major leads to their career.
Oftentimes, careers don’t evolve linearly like that. Sometimes it’s more like:
interests → experiences → skills → opportunities → career
There are more steps to the process. And because of that, the process takes more reflection.
Your plan doesn’t have to become elaborate. You don’t have to have a spreadsheet of your activities and potential career paths.
The most important thing is that you connect the dots between what you actually take interest in.
Reflecting on your experiments is what turns them into direction.
How Exploration Strengthens Your College Application
Although exploration should primarily be about learning more about yourself, it also has another benefit: it naturally strengthens your college applications.
For one, it helps you narrow down your extracurriculars to the things that you actually align with.
Once you write your college application, that leads to stronger activity descriptions, more authentic essays, and clearer demonstrations of your interests.
It can also help you narrow down your college list and create stronger “why us” or “why this major” essays.
And overall, your application can turn more cohesive and connected.
Final Thoughts
The pressure to have your future figured out can make it feel like every decision in high school has to point toward one career. But that’s rarely how successful careers are built.
Instead of asking yourself, “What do I want to be?” ask, “What do I want to explore next?”
Every conversation, project, class, club, or internship gives you another piece of information about yourself. Over time, those pieces begin to connect.
You don’t need a perfect career plan before college. You simply need the curiosity to keep exploring.
