Career Goals

by: J. Danaher-Shea

During the course of this year, the guidance counselors will be discussing many things with your child including his or her career goals. Through these discussions, we hope to get to know your child better and to encourage each student to think about what he or she wants to do in the future. Hopefully, the career horizons of our youngsters will be expanded and they will begin to consider what jobs they would enjoy doing and what it takes in terms of education and skills to accomplish these goals.

Many, many of our students state that their career goal is to be a professional ballplayer. While we hope that they succeed and would never discourage anyone, realistically, not everyone can make the team. By discussing careers that are related to playing ball, the students may get some new ideas. Becoming a gym teacher, a coach or pursuing a career in sports journalism, sports medicine, broadcasting or sports law may be satisfying to the student. A career in grounds keeping, ticket sales, the snack food industry, souvenirs, reservations, etc. still enables the student to be in the sports environment which he or she finds so interesting.

We can also emphasize the need for education to succeed as a professional ballplayer. The pro baseball teams now use the colleges as their farm teams. Professional football and basketball players are noticed while playing college ball. We all know that you can't go to college unless you've graduated from both the 8th grade and high school. Hopefully the students will realize that the work he or she is now doing is related to future dreams.

Some students have mentioned careers like mechanic, security guard, police officer, illustrator, secretary, veterinarian, teacher. We encourage you to discuss various careers with your youngsters so that they can begin to identify careers that will interest them so that they can become happy, productive adults.