Love My Job
I don’t know if everyone knows this already, but talk therapy with young people has a side-effect just as frightening as those from any pill. On occasion, a young person in therapy will experience the desire to become a therapist him or herself. Yeah, I know…creepy. Of course, it’s perfectly understandable, maybe even to be expected. We send our kids to therapists to specifically influence thoughts and behaviors. When it works, those kids, who had no intention of changing either, for anyone, are impressed.
I bring this up because I recently ran across a story from Time that listed the top ten worst paid college undergraduate majors. Anyone care to guess the winner? I now use the story to combat the side-effect.
I’m comforted by the fact that at least these kids are thinking about their futures and where they want to end up. I suppose that, for most of history, we weren’t always blessed with the choice of a profession; we just did whatever our last name was. These days our kids theoretically can do whatever they want for a living. It’s just the theoretical part that’s the problem. It seems, the more choices we are blessed to have, the more errors we are doomed to make.
Growing up, my dad wisely advised that I should attempt to love my work, or alternatively, to work towards doing something that I loved. Given the troubled economic nature of our times, I’ve developed a couple of questions for young people eager to pursue their passions.
Question 1: What does what you love pay?
Question 2: What are the odds that someone will pay you to do the work?
These questions are meant specifically for college bound young people. I single them out because, for most, their occupational pursuit will leave them with a rather large bill. The average college graduate these days owes $24,000 in student loans. The reason I think those two questions are important is that $24,000 is an awful lot to pay off on a waiter’s pay. Or say you get the job. The median income for a psychology degree is $29,000.
Recently, a not insignificant number of educated young people have, like my father at their age, headed to Wall Street, only they are not occupying offices. They are understandably upset about their under-employed status. After all, every loan I’ve ever taken out was immediately accompanied by my acquisition of that which I desired but for which I didn’t have the money. Imagine taking out a mortgage on a home you may never get to live in. Would you feel better if I told you that you really loved that house?
My point is that we need to better prepare our college-bound kids. We assume they have to go to college because it seems all the all kids are. Unfortunately we’re compelled to make this assumption at a time when tuition rates are higher than they’ve ever been. College will be harder than our kids think and harder still for those who don’t know why they are in college in the first place. They need to know that there are hard realities ahead and consequences for the decisions or non-decisions they make. Many of the majors that attract the interest of young people offer little other than deferred interest payments.
In America, we worship youth. We want our kids to be as happy as they can be for as long as possible but there is a point at which we do them a disservice by neglecting to inform them that life gets harder and much less forgiving than homeroom.
I love my job. I can’t imagine doing anything else. But even I don’t have an undergraduate degree in psychology.
Quinton is a Licensed Professional Counselor at Edmond Family Counseling and can be reached at 405-341-3554.
