Finding Your Passion 101 by Katrina

Finding Your Passion 101 by Katrina - August 2015 Scholarship Essay

Countless high school students feel unprepared, lost as to what they should do after they graduate. The common questions students ask themselves are: should they attend a four-year college, community college, a gap year, trade school? An abundance of opportunities for high school students exist after they graduate. Yet how to determine which opportunity to seize is overwhelmingly difficult for a majority of students.

Typically, students are misled to believe immediately enrolling in a four-year college or community college remains as their only option. Though this may be the perfect choice for some, for others it is not. Thus, an immense amount of students attend a college, eventually growing overwhelmed by the workload and the greater, academic standards, becoming anxious over choosing the right career path for them and leads to students dropping out or feeling discouraged in college. About fifty percent of students at a majority of universities in the United States enter undeclared. An increasing population exists of students remaining in school for an extra year or more, for they did not finish in time due to the dilemma of finding certain classes to take that suits them and officially determining their major. What continues as an even more startling challenge is that following graduating, college students still remain confused or lost as what to pursue; remaining as unaware as they were in high school as to the endless career and job opportunities available to them. These problematic situations have become more prominent to me since entering college, as I observe first-handedly my peers and classmates who are becoming even more jaded, stressed and overcome with discouragement as to what they should do.

This problem derives from the fact that the common high school curriculum offers a narrow quantity of topics. Even if a high school provides a great amount of subjects, these classes still may not help students discover their passions or help them to conclude what they wish to pursue after high school.

Due to this detrimental dilemma, I believe a curriculum that guides students to discover their various passions and explore possible career options should be implemented. I’d like to call this curriculum Finding Your Passion 101.

As trite as the curriculum may sound, I see this class as a major method to eradicating the problem of misguided, stressed high school and college students.

Finding Your Passion 101 would be offered to mainly juniors, preparing them to begin looking at certain colleges that would fit their interests and dream careers. Or if after taking this curriculum they discover college is not suited for them, they would learn what other options they may choose after high school such as: taking on a gap year, attending a trade school, or pursuing a job they believe they would love and does not require a higher education (ex. becoming a coffee barista, working in retail).

Disregarding financial factors, Finding Your Passion 101 would offer field trips to four-year colleges, trade schools, community college and various offices for an assortment of job fields. The class would have guest speakers on a weekly basis, whether the speaker is a firefighter, a Literature professor, a chemistry engineer or a public relations intern, students would receive a greater picture of different job opportunities and what these jobs require, information they previously were uninformed about.

The class would be a hands-on learning experience, an educational quality becoming lost in our current curriculums. High school students would become encouraged, invigorated with the endless options awaiting them. The class would guide them as to what they can do after they graduate high school, it would determine their interests and help them to discover passions and skills they may were blind to before, for they never had the opportunity to explore these themselves.

An innumerable quantity of careers and opportunities are available to us young people. Yet we have remained unaware and uninformed. I believe a curriculum like this one would broaden our horizons and electrify this generation of students in astounding ways.

Now this curriculum may not solve all problems for students uncertain and lost as to what they should follow after high school. But it’s a greater beginning and a class that I believe would leave a remarkable impact on high school students and their future.