Nobody has it Figured Out: Choosing Your Path
A calm, honest look at choosing what comes next — for teens who don't know yet, and the parents helping them figure it out.
When I was a freshman in high school, I knew EXACTLY what I wanted to do for a career: Equine Massage Therapist. I would move to an area with high-dollar horses and get paid to pet horses! It would require a certification program and a lot of biology knowledge, anatomy in particular.
The closest I ever came was when I worked as an "Equine Sanitation Technician" — a title I gave myself while getting paid to scoop poop at a local horse barn. It turns out biology is not my favorite, and I actually managed to graduate high school without ever taking a biology class.
Instead, our school counselors had us do a career counseling survey, and it came back suggesting anything in the STEM and arts fields. I like art, but I do better with suggestions and parameters for projects, and landed on drafting. First it was architectural drafting in particular, but memorizing lumber sizes was too much work, so I settled on mechanical drafting. I attended the local technical school as part of my high school courses and continued on to a state technical school to earn my associate's in Design Drafting Technology. The day I graduated high school, I received a job offer working for a civil engineering firm doing civil drafting and surveying, which I continued to work as I started my college journey.
While finishing up my two-year degree and working at the engineering firm, I decided maybe I wanted to be an engineer. As I began looking into it, a program caught my attention that offered engineering students the opportunity to graduate with a teaching certificate. I was working as a color guard coach for a local high school and thought continuing to work with students would be interesting as a career, too.
After a lot of thought, reflection, and discussion with the engineers around me, I settled on going to school to become a physics teacher, and the fall after my tech school graduation, I began courses for my bachelor's in education. After a transfer of schools, I managed to graduate with a Bachelor's of Education in Secondary Science Education with a focus in Physics. I got those biology classes after all — and still didn't enjoy them — but I did enjoy the engineering courses I took as electives for my program. Eventually I had a teaching position that required me to teach anatomy, and I started working toward my master's in education. But then I switched teaching positions and immediately switched my classes to avoid a master's-level anatomy course. Instead took a computer programming course.
After ten years of teaching, I left the classroom and am now making a full-time job out of tutoring and managing all the projects I can create for myself — including working with Reid to rebrand and build Experienced Educators into what it is today.
Somewhere along the way, I heard that the average adult changes careers five times over their lifetime. I haven't reached that number yet, but there's still time.
I'm telling you all of this because I want you to hear it directly from someone who's lived it: nobody has it all figured out. Plans can and do change over time. There are many tools and people to help you figure out what you want to do first after high school, and many factors play a role in the opportunities available to you.
Why the "right" path looks different for everyone
I'm a firm believer in "you can do anything you set your mind to." Don't get me wrong on that. But I also know that the cost isn't always worth the reward — and what counts as a "cost" is different for everyone.
Take my own path. I lived in a town where the high school offered technical school courses as part of our regular course schedule — a five-minute bus ride, fully provided, built right into my school day. That access is what let me start working in my career field while I was still finishing high school. Without it, drafting probably isn't the path I stumble into so early.
My home state also had a program where students with a decent GPA who completed enough free tutoring hours and the right paperwork could earn two years free at any state community college; they also offered scholarship opportunities at most state universities toward a four-year degree. Because of that, I genuinely didn't have to think about how to pay for school until I started my bachelor's degree. Not every student has that available to them, and that changes the calculation enormously.
Family plays a role too, and it's not the same role for everyone. I was fine living far away from my family, so it was easy for me to pursue my bachelor's in Hawaii and not come home for holidays. Other students are in different situations and need to stay close to family — and that's not a smaller or lesser reason to choose a path. It's just a different set of priorities.
The point isn't that any one of these things — access to programs, financial support, family circumstances — determines what a teen "should" do. It's that the path that worked for me only worked because of what was available to me. Comparing your family's situation to someone else's success story rarely tells you much, because you're usually only seeing the outcome, not the conditions that made it possible.
Multiple roads, same destination
There are also multiple pathways to the same outcome, and it helps to actually name a few, because the "typical" one gets treated like the only one.
Some students jump straight from high school to college. Others take a gap year. Some don't know what they want to do until years later and go back to school later in life. Others choose on-the-job training, apprenticeships, certification programs, or military service before or alongside their entrance into the workforce. None of these is automatically the "smart" choice or the "risky" choice — they're just different roads.
Here's a concrete example. The typical path to becoming a doctor might look like: high school → college → medical school. But another version might look like this: someone starts as a physical therapy aide right out of high school because they didn't know what else to do and someone helped them get the job. On the job, they realize they want to pursue something medical-related, so they work toward a few certifications their employer will cover for advancement. Then they attend classes at night as time and money allow, working slowly toward a bachelor's degree. Eventually they continue on to graduate-level work — and someday, they're a doctor too.
To some people, the first, direct path looks easiest. To others, the longer path is the better, more sustainable choice — the one that actually fits their life. Both get to the same place.
A word to the teen reading this
If you don't know yet, you're not behind. You're not required to have a five-year plan at sixteen. You're allowed to change your mind — more than once. What matters more than picking the "right" answer right now is staying curious about what you're good at and what you actually enjoy doing, and being willing to adjust course when something isn't working. That's not failure. That's just what the process looks like for most people.
A word to the parents reading this
Your job in this stage isn't to hand your teen the one correct path — it's to help widen the options they can see. That might mean researching what technical programs, scholarship pathways, or apprenticeship routes are actually available where you live, since those vary a lot by state and district and most families don't know what exists until they go looking. It might mean having honest conversations about cost versus reward as a family, since that calculation is different for everyone. And it might just mean giving your teen permission to not know yet, without treating that as a problem to be solved immediately.
That's really what this comes down to: there isn't one right order of operations, and there isn't a deadline for figuring it out. There are tools, people, and programs to help along the way — and we'd love to be one of them. If your teen is navigating this stage and could use some real, lived-experience guidance (not just a worksheet), reach out — we're teachers who've actually been through it, more than once.
