chapter 8

I thought this chapter was rather interesting. I know I learned something by reading this. For one, I did not realize that so few people actually go to college. In my family, there was no question of whether or not I was going to college. Fortunately, I wanted to. I also did not know that this O*NET thing existed until now. I am going to have to check that out after midterms. I also found it odd that many children apparently do not know what their parents do in detail. My mom would sometime bring her work home and let me listen to the doctors' recordings while I pretended to type as fast as her. Only now that she's in the corporate world do I have no idea what she does, most likely because she does an insane cluster of really complicated things at once. My dad is a car dealer and I would often-times need to go to work with him if he got called in. They were very open about what they did, although the financial aspect has always been off-limits, even now.


My institutions were pretty scant when it came to career development. I thought it was because I went to an mostly inner-city Catholic schools from P-12, but I questioned a couple of my room mates on their training and they had little more than I did. Mark went to an affluent school in Scranton, PA and had Career Days, and Amanda went to school somewhere in Kentucky and had some resume writing and interviews. I'm pretty sure I had absolutely no training, other than life skills, such as budgeting and family planning. I even went to my advisor and she was no help. No wonder there's so many people who have no idea what to do in the way of careers. We're getting zero training and are expected to just sort of know. I did not see my first career fair until my freshman year of undergrad, which I should have taken advantage of because I still feel lost as to what to say during interviews. I did go to the Career Development office and take some tests, which just confirmed my psychology choice. It did not occur to me at that time that I may eventually need to improve my interview skills. We're just expected to learn these things by trial and error, I guess. I feel like schools need to focus more on these skills and career development at all ages, because colleges are going to be filled with students who can ace Pre-Calc and Chemistry, but don't know what they want to do with their lives.

 

On that note, back to studying for midterms. Good luck, everyone :)

 

Brown, D. (2007). Career information, career counseling, and career development (9h ed.). New York: Pearson Education, Inc