Plans are useless; planning is vital. If you had a dollar/pound for every one of us who had, at 15, a clear idea of what we wanted to do that turned out to be quite wrong (in my case, I was just wrong about what aspect of my favourite school subject I was going to enjoy most at a high level, but it still made a big difference in terms of what career choices were sensible).

I'd recommend taking a step away from the idea of getting a single label for a career she wants to do, and looking at it several ways. E.g.:

Get her to think about what decisions she has to take when (not just now, but later too) and what paths there are towards the various things she wants to do. E.g., if she's interested in neuroscience, there are endless different ways in. People go into neuroscience from medicine, mathematics, biology, physics, computer science, psychology... Other careers such as veterinary medicine may be much more restricted in terms of what she has to decide soon if that's where she wants to end up.

Get her to make a graph, with a node for where she is now, edges for the different choices she may make next, nodes for each college major she might end up at, etc.! If a choice she makes soon is going to commit her to only one of the things she's currently interested in, that's OK if she's OK about it (there are always more choices than one realises at the time!) but there's an obvious advantage in making choices that leave several of one's favourite options open - not least that if a choice leads to several promising career options, it suggests there may be something about the choice that fits one's preferences, and it might also lead to other good options.

Get her to list as explicitly as she can *why* she's interested in each of the things she's interested in - and why she's not interested in certain other things - and help her to see patterns. It's quite likely that she hasn't yet ever heard of her eventual career, or even that it doesn't exist yet...

(Btw, you'd better not tell her so, unless your DH already has, but it's very suspicious that she claims not to be interested in computer stuff but is interested in anything involving meticulous planning and scheduling - I'd hazard a guess that what she's got there is some seriously denied software engineering talent :-) But that's fine, she can use it for something else :-)

Make sure she thinks about aspects of her future career other than just the academic interest of the job. For example, does she want to travel? Does she see herself in management some day, or running her own business in whatever it is, or does she recoil from those things? Does she like meeting new people all the time, or does she prefer to get to know a group of people well? Does she get on easily with all kinds of people or is she happier in a group that's mostly like her? How much does she think money and what money can buy will be important to her? Security versus risk? Suppose she had children, would it be important to her to be able to take a significant career break and still go back? Of course it's impossible to give definite answers to any of these, but thinking about them may help her to get a clearer picture of what kind of career she's looking for.

And in the end, she can give a label to school - she isn't bound by it :-)


Email: my username, followed by 2, at google's mail