Smart but unmotivated HS junior

MAmomto4
Fri, 24 Feb 2023 16:02:58 +0000

I replied earlier in the thread that my son has a lot of similarities to yours. One piece of advice I have gotten here on CC repeatedly is that he doesn’t need to know what he’s going to study when he starts college. I think maybe you feel like I do that it’s one thing to not know exactly what you want to study, and another to have absolutely no idea at all in any direction, which is where my son was six months ago.

One of the things I have done over the past few months is talk to my son here and there about what tasks he likes to do in his current classes & what ideas he likes thinking about, what things he likes to do out of classes (“video games” ) and what aspects of those activities he enjoys. I’ve asked him questions like what types of problems does he enjoy solving? I’ve given him options, if you had to do one of these things, A or B, which would you choose and why? None of that has generated any lightbulb moments for what he might want to study, but it has helped him think about the future a little more concretely. That is not something my S24 does naturally.

I have also talked with him about “productive activities“ and “consumptive activities”. He likes to play video games so much, but that is primarily a consumer activity, and you can’t make a living by consuming (generally). So, what about playing video games does he like? And are there ways that those aspects of video gaming he likes could be productive activities?

Finally, another thing that I have done is find some colleges that have pretty detailed descriptions of the courses you need to take for a major. Then (it was a lot of work!) I pulled together the class descriptions for each of those required classes for some majors he thought he might be interested in, but stripped the titles of the classes off so he didn’t get distracted by the department or the class title. I presented him with a handful of “anonymous” majors at a time over a few weeks, and asked him to rate them. I also asked him what about that major appealed to him, and what did he not like. I then used that information to choose some different majors that were a little bit like it or a little bit different. In the end, we have a ranking of 21 different majors. I don’t think it is a final result for him, but it did help him think more clearly about what it would be like to study different fields, and he encountered some fields that he never knew about that he’s starting to be excited about. (Linguistics courses, for example, were really attractive to him, and that is not something I would have ever thought to suggest.) Another thing I noticed is that he really preferred interdisciplinary majors over any major that was strictly one field.

So maybe having your son explore a bit what the 4-year course progression for a few majors would be helpful. I think that could be especially helpful if you think math might be of interest to him. My S23 though he would like math, but when he saw the proof-heavy upper level classes required at many schools for a math degree he realized he was actually interested in applied math, or even in a field that uses math as a tool, but doesn’t go so much into math theory.