I'm trying to help my teenager figure out a direction he want to go after H.S.? Yesterday we had a meeting with his school counselor to plan for the last two years of H.S. and the upcoming college search. When the counselor asked DS what he was interested in doing after H.S. he just shrugged. After a few questions where he 'had no answer' which is very typical for him on this type of question. In order to move the meeting on I finally had to interject that we had already talked about going to 4 year college to study some type of STEM and DS planned to take 2 more years of math & science in H.S. (I'm trying hard not to speak for him but we could have spend the whole meeting hemming and hawing.) It's clear from his transcript that he is much stronger in math/science that the humanities so this was met by agreement by all.

The counselor brought up the results from a 'career inventory' that he has been asked to do. Recently he told me he thought this kind of thing was not useful as he had no idea how to rate any of the answers, the questions are all stupid and had no idea how to respond much of the time. He really doesn't play well with this type of psychological survey. Amusingly it rated my son's top choice as "Zoologist" which is something I might have said when he was 4 as his preschool passion was animals. But this is something he grew out of and not something I see him interested in these days. He even looks at me funny when I mention it as if he has totally forgotten. I see him more in math/computer science or engineering. And honestly he does better in Chem than Bio because it's more based on math. This survey that by his words he didn't try very hard on did identify computer programmer as another option for him so I'm not sure it's totally inaccurate. And if you ask what science he WANTS to take next year his topic choice is AP Biology over AP Physics or AP Chem, but I think that's partly because the other students say that AB Bio is a good class with a good teacher.

The question I was hoping this board could help me with was unusual idea's to help my 2E son figure out what he might be interested in besides playing computer games. Any idea's on how I can help him that don't involve filling out 'stupid' questionnaires. (His words) I don't think he needs to have a precise 'career" figured out at 16. And we can continue to plan around the fact he is interested in STEM. But to find a good fit college it really helps to know if you are looking in engineering, math/computer science or the biological sciences particularly if one is looking at smaller schools. In a search to see what colleges we might tour this summer it was very obvious that many schools don't have engineering programs. And while you can find good CS programs in engineering schools, you don't don't need a good engineering school to find a good CS school.