I’m sure high school guidance counsellors still exist on some level. I would imagine their role primarily revolves around making sure kids get placed in the appropriate class for their abilities and whatnot.
Those of us in Gen X who graduated high school in the 80s and early 90s, you didn’t have the Internet or the various career sites that exist today. So guidance counsellors often had a role in helping to choose career paths. And as you can see, their advice was usually “abysmal to useless”.
The old joke is if your high school guidance counsellor knew anything about picking a career, they wouldn’t be a high school guidance counsellor in your shitty high school earning $50k a year. But in a way it’s kind of true. They are typically educated with maybe a masters in education and they’ve probably been working in whatever town your school is in for years. What do they really know about becoming a lawyer or engineer or computer programmer? So they tend to work in broad strokes like "good students apply to college, mediocre students look at community college, vo-ed, or maybe consider the military.
That’s funny. It sort of fits my brother in law to a T.
He’s a big car enthusiast, so you would have thought the very prospect of having to drive all over the tri-state area in a car emblazoned with “Geiko” livery would have deterred him from such a path.
The military is one choice where our guidance counsellors were lacking. Mind, I’m in Canada, where we actually do have a military, but it is not pushed as much as a career choice as in the US.
A high-school friend wanted to join the Canadian military, specifically the “Air Command.” That’s as it was then known; it is now once again, the Royal Canadian Air Force. Anyway, our high school had nothing on it, or the Canadian navy, or the Canadian army. It did have a few dusty brochures on the Royal Military College (RMC, much like West Point in the US), but as we have no Air Force Academy or Naval College like Annapolis, that was the best it could do. But he didn’t have the grades for RMC, and was perfectly willing to start at the bottom, and work his way up. And our high school guidance office couldn’t help him. It didn’t know how.
He eventually called the 800-number of the Canadian Forces that he found in the phone book, and was recruited that way. But the lack of offering the military as a viable career at our high school’s guidance office still surprises me.
Maybe a hijack, but a question for our American friends: when you were in high school, was the US military presented as a viable career, alongside universities, colleges, and trade schools?
…he could have said “Well, looks like you suck at everything”
I had a student who was completely unmotivated, and in a conversation basically said that he stunk at English, flunked Math, and his counselor noticed that the only good grade he ever had was in a drawing class, so here he was… in a very demanding art school.
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I was planning to go to med school, and got to shadow a neighbor who’s a doctor. Well, he was a radiologist, and had almost no human contact during the day.
The neighbor who ran a design studio, on the other hand… I walked in and it was like a party. Loud dance music, lots of jeans and t-shirts, and beverages from the client (they were working on a big project for a brewery).
I recall nothing about guidance counseling in high school. I don’t know if I’ve simply forgotten it, or maybe there was none.
But my mom recalled what a guidance counselor told a friend of hers. This was in 1950, so very dated. The friend was Hispanic, and wanted to be a nurse, and the counselor told her “You people can’t handle a job like that.” So the friend became an RN anyway, and as soon as she got the diploma traveled back to the school, sought out the counselor, and waved it in their face, saying “See, see!!!”
I went to UCLA during my senior year in high school. Never more than two classes per quarter. But being on the honors program (as this was) I didn’t even have to apply to go to post-high school classes there. I was just considered a continuing student. The Cal program didn’t work that way? Or did she go to a different university? Just curious…
Well, I was a girl (actually still am), so I wasn’t interested or had anyone interested in me for a military career. But my high school wasn’t just mostly college prep; it was university prep. And, of course, Vietnam was heating up.
Don’t think I had any dealings with counselors in high school. In grade school, I did take a test which sounds similar to the OP’s and the punchcards spat out “train engineer”. Never really followed up on that option…I knew what happened to Casey Jones.
She was considered a matriculated pre-freshman, and could have gone the next year without applying again. I forgot if she had two classes or three, but she was basically going half time.
And after a year she had not the slightest desire to go there, partially because it was too close to home. So she went to the University of Chicago, more expensive but better for her.
I was not the slightest bit offended about her wanting to leave. I lived in NY, and I got into Cooper Union, which was free, but I much preferred to go to MIT. It was the right move by far.
Taking community college classes was no big deal, but she was the only person in her high school who did this program.
The test I took said I should consider computer programming or farming. My guidance counselor told me that programming computers was difficult and I wasn’t suited to it. I went to one of the best public high schools in the US. I had 96th percentile scores on the SAT and ACT. I had straight A’s in math and computer programming classes. I had been programming computers since I was 10. She had never spoken to me before. Yet she knew that I didn’t have the aptitude to program computers.
I politely told her that I was going to give it a shot anyway. I have been programming computers professionally since I was 19. Thirty four years and nobody has yet figured out that I’m a fraud who doesn’t have the aptitude for it.
So I graduated in 2014… we had a senior guidance counselor, but he was mostly there for working out your course schedule at the beginning of the year, and to deal with the screwups the rest of the time. He’s the dude they’d send to walk you to the principal’s office if you got in a fight or were caught with weed. While I’m sure he gave a lot of kids outgoing career advice, if it ever happened to me I don’t remember it.
We were a D-rated school when I graduated, probably 3/4 graduation rate, very low expectations for the student body. Now, when I was a freshman/sophmore/junior, I used the guidance counselors to help decide which elective courses to enroll in. My original plan was to become a draftsman or architect or artist, but two years into that education both the drafting and (2D) art programs were dropped. I pivoted to engineering and it was my engineering teacher who, at my behest, helped get me set up with an unpaid internship… at a computer repair shop on the other side of the school fence. And I asked her for help finding an internship not because of some desire to become a computer repair technician, but because that sort of thing apparently looks good for college admissions. And as for the engineering plan, the school dropped calculus and physics in my senior year because all the kids were failing the AP tests.
Sure, we had “Ratzis”/“Blueberry Scouts” (Junior Reserve Office Training Corps, or JROTC). Our branch was affiliated with the Air Force. The nicknames sound mean but it was just a joke everyone used - nobody disliked them and they were nice.
We had one kid who joined some kind of junior army cadet program in middle school (I think the international equivalent is lower secondary education). He shaved his head, would wear military fatigues and pack to school, and attended a bunch of veteran events before being shipped off to some military academy.
I rather agree with you. Though mine came up as “beautician” and I laughed, I also had acne and sympathize with others who have that issue. Maybe what is now called an esthetician would have been satisfactory, or a clothing stylist. There is a lot of satisfaction in making people feel better about themselves. It’s creative, which rings my bell. But I think I would have grown bored in the long run.
Vocational tests were generally useless during the 60s, but my first boss (in the mid-70s) sprang for anyone who wanted to take a SIMA test (System for Identifying Motivated Attributes, given by a private firm).
Intriguing approach, where the test asked for long essays on subjects like “Favorite hobby or project you did as a child, with your friends”.
(Quite apart from the test results, I realized that what I loved the most about building that treehouse back in grade school was the fact that I got all the neighbor kids, of multiple ages, to pitch in… and it was very much The Neighborhood Treehouse! Years later, when I had to choose, I took a job where I got to be part of a team.)
The other interesting thing was that they compared your preferences/motivators to other test takers, assuming you’d be happiest working with people with values and personalities close to yours.
I scored highest for Designer and Minister.*
Lowest for Army Officer.
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*When I took the test I was… a graphic designer, and a youth minister on the side! (No, they didn’t ask me that on the test:-)
If I recall, our high school (circa class of 91) guidance counsellor was helpful in providing information like dates and forms and other procedural stuff around the college application process, taking the SATs and whatnot.
What the high school guidance counsellor can’t really do is tell you what career to pick at 18. Particularly if you are at either end of the bell curve.
Like I found an interest in my CAD drafting and architecture electives in high school. Plus I had a general interest and ability in science and art. My architecture teacher was so impressed he offered to help pull some strings to get me into a program at one of the local community colleges where he was connected.
I mean thanks and all, but by then I already had acceptances from RPI, Lehigh, Boston U, Boston Collage, Villanova and a dozen other schools. Oh by the way, my guidance counsellor thought my grades might not be strong enough so I should apply to lots of schools just in case. So I had to spend half the year filling out applications and touring campuses for like 20 schools. I ended up getting accepted to all of them (except Syracuse. Syracuse? Who the fuck do you think you are?)
We didn’t have a guidance counsellor at my school (UK, left in 2001), just a computer programme, which we were told to use one day. It was pretty impressively bad.
No-one was checking up on us filing it out, and the results weren’t recorded, so me and a friend had multiple goes, to see what we could make the system spit out. It was one of those with statements which you had to agree/disagree. The most meorable bit of info we eked out was the effect of one of the questions, some variant on ‘I cope well in stressful situations’; if you answered ‘Strongly agree’ you got recommended a job in the funeral industry, regardless of what you answered on any other question. If you agreed at all that you usually got good exam results, you got funeral director; if you disagreed you got grave digger.
I will note that I seem to be finally moving into a career that really interests me- research, so I guess that story does kinda indicate that, even if the programme didn’t…
The school unofficially saw itself as a university prep school; at no point did they even acknowledge that not going was an option, but that seemed to be seen as a goal in itself, and they really didn’t seem to consider what would happen afterwards. Perhaps unsurprisingly, although over 99% of the class went to university, we had a really high dropout rate once we got there, because we basically realised that we had no idea why were were there.
actually, I was in a job class for 2 years and the army and air force recruiters came to the class and talked to us … Of course, since I live in aerospace central and about 45 minutes from Edwards air force base …
But before gulf war I the army was seen as a last resort mainly as a way for poor kids to go to college or get career training although with my dad’s connections I could have got a cushy job somewhere but even in better physical shape than I am now I couldn’t have made it past basic …