Who has a smart, ambitious, hard working kid but doesn't really like any area a lot?

Applying to College
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When I think of adults I know who live rewarding lives, about half of them do something they are passionate about. The other half chose a career that fit with their aptitudes, that they don’t dislike, and that gives them what they need to live they life they want outside of work. One of the happiest adults I know is an accountant. He’s not passionate about accounting. But he’s good at it, and he doesn’t mind the work, and he’s successful enough in his field that he could reduce his hours to be home when his kids (who he is passionate about) get home from school, and take lots of vacations to cool places for rock climbing, and hiking, and kayaking, all of which is he passionate about too.

Maybe have your kid think about what they want their adulthood to look like, and backwards plan from there. Then pick a set of majors that are related and share some prerequisites. If one of them is harder to get into, apply for that one, because transferring out to another will be easier. Start with gen eds, and prereqs, and see how that path feels when you’re on it.

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Boy, that’s a lot of pressure on a kid! Does every high school kid know that consumer products companies hire psych majors for both creative and analytical roles? Or that public companies need English majors who have taken a few finance classes for well compensated roles in Investor Relations?

Isn’t it enough for a hs kid to know they love chemistry without a clear sense of the hundred or so paths that could lead to? Including jobs that don’t even exist today??

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As an example from that, two chemistry graduates I know ended up doing very well in the markets, one as a sell-side energy company analyst and the other as a fixed interest fund manager. No, neither had any idea that path lay ahead.

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Yes. I was going to add something similar. My husband’s passion has always been music. He loves playing, creating, listening. But he works as an engineer. He really likes his job and enjoys what he does. Plus he still loves music and spends much of his free time doing it. He also worried that if he majored in music he would stop loving it, or it would become a burden. This has really worked well for him for 30 years now. So careers definitely don’t need to align with passions.

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I really like your post. This was me - the aspiring sports journalist. I worked in sports television. I was 3P-4A 6 days a week - and then some days regular. I consumed sports growing up. I remember my one off day, the NBA finals was on - didn’t even care to watch it. Even today, I rarely watch sports - maybe 10% of the time I used to.

If you truly have a passion - something fun like music - nothing wrong with keeping it in the right place - so that it remains a passion long term.

Nothing wrong with pursuing it career wise either - but there is a chance, as a responsibility instead of a joyful pursuit, that the love could be lost if over consumed.

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Best thing to do is let him explore and find his passion as he matures. That’s what college is for. When I started college, I wanted to be a doctor. Then I took biology…ugh! I still have nightmares about that class. I found my passion in IT and love it.

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OP’s kid doesn’t kow that they love chemistry. They “don’t mind chemistry”. And they already are feeling a lot of pressure to choose a major.

Studying what you love, and using college to figure out where that passion might lead, is a great path for a lot of kids. And yes, they might discover that that major leads to a career they never even heard of. But that path is not working for OP’s kid right now. So, thinking “if I don’t discover a passion, what are some things I’d enjoy doing” and looking at majors that can lead to those things seems like a less stressful choice, especially when paired with a school that allows flexibility to change.

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I will chime in with the others than says PLEASE do not pressure a kid to figure out their career/major so early. It’s just going to cause stress. If you want to vent and talk things through here or amongst friends, great. Just don’t put pressure on your kid!

That being said, I tried to help figure out careers to an extent with mine. We live in a small working class town, where they had little to no exposure to professional careers. Knew medicine was out. Probably teaching too. I’m an engineer who felt like it was chosen for me. I don’t mind being an engineer, but 30+ years later I think there would have been better choices. That being said, I didn’t see the classic engineer qualities in either of mine and certainly didn’t want to push them down that path.

Both were great students, older S especially so having taken calculus at the local college in middle school. But I looked at more than “what subjects do they like that school.” I can’t say either of them came home excited about school - especially the younger! He said (despite getting straight As) that school was stupid pretty much every single day until college. Just randomly taking classes in college wouldn’t have helped him much either. If he doesn’t like a subject or teacher, he is really not going to like the subject.

I looked more at what drives them as people outside the classroom. Not necsssarily hobbies either. Older S was easier. He obviously was great at math, but he loves money. Especially figuring out weird ways to make it. I know zilch about the financial world and sent him to college knowing it would be math and some kind of finance/business/econ. Let them (kid and school) figure it out. And he is now in the financial world.

The younger one? He loved animals - but being a vet was not happening. He loved military history, especially medieval. He loves soccer. Definitely not going to be a pro or even play in college except club level, but through playing it on the Xbox, he discovered he loves geography. He also is an analyst at heart. Every day in elementary school, he’d take 30 min to tell me EVERYTHING that happened on the playground. And not just facts, but what he was thinking with each move he made and why, based on what everyone else was doing. Yes, my eyes glazed over. He also was fascinated with the South American drug cartel. Not what parents love to hear lol.

So what does that lead to? I happened to be flipping through a course catalog at one of his favorite schools and found “intelligence analysis.” The courses sounded so fun for him. I showed it to him, telling him please not to do it for me. The last thing I wanted to do was pick a major for him. But he wound up majoring in it, and absolutely loving it. Graduated top of his class from that school, and has a job he really likes. The same kid who hated school every day. Go figure.

Oh yeah, he was required with the program to pick a minor to pair with it. Started with Spanish as he is fluent from talking with his friends and coaches in soccer, but that ended when he had to do more than just learn the language. He did not want to read literature. Tried data analysis but hated coding. Wound up with geography and loved that and wound up getting a double major. Ironically, I’ve been in charge of our public works dept GIS for over 25 years and he never showed the slightest interest in it before!

Anyhow, just a couple of thoughts. But a reminder. Do not pressure your kid! If I had done that with my younger one, it would have been a disaster.

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Physics is usually the smallest of these three majors, and may offered at the bare minimum level (e.g. each required upper level course once every two years), with few additional upper level electives, so investigate the department offerings carefully at smaller schools.

Biology is typically a large major (or group of majors), although there are lots of subareas, so some subareas may not be present in every department.