Tips for discovering your passion
It’s frankly quite frustrating to be in high school and not know exactly what avenues to pursue in life. You could have a vague idea of what you want to study in college, but no concrete career options. You could have absolutely no sense of where you would like to end up at all. There’s no shame in that, but as you head off to college and begin your life outside the rigid structure of high school determined by monotone bells and assigned lunch times, you may want to think about what your life might look like soon.
The easiest way to find out what you are passionate about is to try new things. Vandegrift offers many clubs- from book club to fishing club– and new clubs pop up every school year. Even if you don’t think one of these clubs calls out to you, you should still attend at least one meeting. Sometime the most random experiences with a group of people passionate about a certain thing can spark something within you that you never knew was there. The worst case scenario is that you learn about a club that you otherwise would not have, and you could tell others in your life about it.
For a more permanent immersion into something new, try enrolling in an elective you’ve never tried before. One of the best things about our school is that it offers so many electives to its students. Some take electives that are seen as easy to pass or get an A in, however, if you are worried about not knowing what you want to do in life, these electives might not be the best for you. Try to enroll in electives with topics you could see yourself pursuing in college or in life. Because electives last for the whole school year, you should consider joining a new class more carefully than joining a new club. You can still use electives to gain a new perspective on what you’d like to do, though. Even if that perspective is that you don’t want to be involved with whatever elective you took in college, that’s still okay because now you’ve narrowed your list of opportunities to explore.
When I moved to Austin the summer before freshman year, I was completely unsure about what career I wanted to pursue. I did not excel at anything that I both enjoyed and would be a potentially stable source of income in the future. My mom advised me to enroll in journalism, and even though I resisted at first, I still found myself in the journalism classroom on the first day of school. I joined a few clubs, but nothing really stood out to me as something I wanted to be part of my life forever. Journalism slowly crept up the list to become my favorite subject, and I discovered a passion within me for uncovering community stories and sharing news stories with the student body. I now plan to study journalism in college, and I can’t imagine myself having a career that does not relate to journalism in some way.
In the end, you have to discover what you want to do with your life for yourself. It might be hard and frustrating, but the school has several resources to help you. Eventually, everyone will discovering their life’s calling.