Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Looking for ideas for my high schooler

Hi UM-

does your counseling office at school have any career assessment tools? Our school has the kids taking multiple assessments like this over the Hs and middle school years- perhaps your school uses them with older students and they would provide them for your DD? That said, our kids generally found them to be of pretty limited value, but YMMV, and it might provide some direction.

Over the years I have followed your DD’s story, as she sounds very similar in many ways to my kids. Does she like languages? I remeber she was interested in music and composing at one point, as my DD was. She also was a very strong math student, but had little interest in it. I think her affinity for language is probably related, and wondered if your DD has this as well. Ours is in her first year of college, and is excited about the prospect of adding more foreign languages to her skill set, especially given all the travel/foreign study/international internships available these days. That said, it was important to her to choose a liberal-arts college, and she wanted there to be some distribution/core requirements, because she strongly believes in broad, diverse education, and wanted to be surrounded by kids with curious natures who also wanted to explore lots of varied areas.

You mentioned your DD is interested in travel, perhaps that could be an avenue to explore? It is very early to look at specific schools, but there are many that emphasize study abroad programs of all sorts, in virtually any field.

Along those lines, has she ever considered things like intelligence work? My DD would probably balk at some of the authority and rule-following required, but there are some interesting pathways there, some of which might appeal to your DDs technology/computer interests as well.

You mention she is strong in science yet not passionate- is there any way to get her exposure to more broad types of science? School science is pretty cut and dry. Our kids were lucky to have exposure to a lot of different topics through science olympiad, but there are many ways to explore. They found less-known subjects like remote sensing, geomapping, hydrogeology, glaciology, oceanography, protein modeling, wind power, etc, to be much more interesting than what happened in school science class. The courses they had available didn’t touch on these topics, but they were able to learn a tremendous amount on their own. Alternatively, there are likely some more exotic course offerings at the local college or even online. The science olympiad stuff was very time-consuming, but if the only science my kids were exposed to was in school, they would probably not have much interest, either...

Is there any way to get her involved in research? That’s another avenue that is really not touched on in most school programs, but made a big difference for my DD. Working in a lab was much different than she expected; she found she loved the collaborative nature of the work, and the camaraderie. She also loved the independence and responsibility, and the ability to be at least somewhat creative. She was surprised at how important her good writing skills were, and though oral presentations were stressful, found that they also required some very specific skills and strengths she didn’t know she had.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that exposure is so helpful, either negative or positive experiences. If you can’t find help through your school, your university might have programs for high schoolers- that’s how my DD got involved (but just so you know, at least the program she did was very competitive, in part because it was a paid internship, but mainly because it was a program with limited spots in established engineering programs that have great results with students...so good grades and references were pretty important).

Just some random thoughts. Good luck, it is a very exciting and frustrating time!

ETA- what about doing an internship or volunteering at the zoo, a library, or at a museum? Or an arts organization? Something DD strongly considered but ended up not applying for was an internship with a symphony, where the responsibilities could be somewhat tailored to the applicant’s interests, ie, education, marketing/outreach, administrative/librarian type duties, etc.