What did your Career Guidance Counsellor tell you?

iirc:

"You could try for singing, you're good at that, hmm? Or Sports, you like sports? Your results say you could do very well in insurance? You want to do Theoretical Physics? Have you spoken to Mr Jordan? You want to do it anyway? OK, put it down. Quantity Surveying is very big right now too."

I don't know what my guidance counselor actually did - I saw her once a year near the end of the spring semester to pick out my classes and so she could make sure I was still on the honors diploma plan (which all went to hell junior year).

Not a word the rest of the year.

We didn't have one. Our principal just had a brief chat with each student and told them they should be a doctor, an accountant or a teacher (regardless of what they wanted and whether they were any good at school) and that under no circumstances was art college a "real college".

I sy her like it was a single woman, but it was actually a different woman every single year from seventh grade until graduation.

mine sent me the wrong day to trinity for the theoretical physics open day, i think mr jordan had 'a word'

Never saw a careers counsellor.

it shows, tbh, it shows

"you shoiuld probably get a job that requires the minimum amount possible of yr interest and mental energy in order to focus on an online message board"

Mine was a pony-tailed left-wing hippy who seemed a bit disappointed when i told him i was planning to study law instead of politics. I liked him a lot.

we had one but i can't remember what he told me, if he told me anything at all. there def wasn't much focus on it. this seems weird given that i went to a good school but i had no idea about careers - like, what my options even were - until the end of university.

xxp It's called 'being unemployed'.

(yearly salary is shit but on an hourly basis it's not to bad)

ye've a good union yis fucks

my experience of careers advice was mostly rubbish. i have an idea where they shd have a database to hand of the general number of jobs in a particular field in a country so the next time some kid tells them they want to do a Media Studies BTEC they can explain the real life odds of it leading to a career

I took an aptitude test in high school that said I should be a game show host or a reverend.

purgatory!

Did anyone else do something called JIG-CAL?

'Jobs Ideas Generator - Computer Aided Learning'?
Oh and I remember why I never got any careers guidance advice at school: the teacher ostensibly in charge of that was a complete dragon who would tear your head off for no reason. So everyone stayed away from her.

yeah i recall JIG-CAL now you mention it

Jack shit. Rumor was that she was a-drinkin' behind that constantly closed door.

The Jiig-Cal system - an acronym of Job Ideas and Information Generator Computer Assisted Learninghttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7463561.stm

Now being foisted upon unsuspecting Australia kids...
http://www.jiig-cal.com.au/

My high school had a career counselor. My high school was also my father's place of employment as a H.S. english teacher, so the two of them were colleagues. He tried as best he could to project a respectful attitude toward her (that he clearly did not feel), and as the years passed, it became equally obvious to me she nurtured a spiteful animosity toward him, too.

That is why I never once walked into her office to seek her guidance, as far as I can recall, and if I did, I forgot whatever she said as thoroughly as it is possible to forget. Of course, I was a complete bumbler in terms of college applications and my entire college career was a series of pratfalls and heartaches until I finally stumbled into a good situation, almost by accident.

we didn't have one but even if we did i'm sure i still would have dropped out of university during the first year and gone on the dole and become a big lush. one of the nuns who taught me was always convinced i had a vocation to be a teaching nun like her so she gave me a lot of advice about that but after i quit university she ended up in wellington at the same time as me and i would slummock past her convent to go to the bottle store so after a few earthly visions through a tweaked blind she dropped it. she was very kind though, she said to my mother, 'i see estela in the street sometimes and i do worry about her, she's just so...small...', i loved her for not telling tales.

"well, your results indicate that you might do well as a career guidance counselor."

Just do something with languages, you're very good at that.

I didn't.

Should have.

apart from everything else in the first post he also told me that law and EU studies would be a good choice

lord help me but if id somehow picked and stuck with that one id be an even worse mess now, or I'd have been the same mess sooner perhaps

trying to figure out in my own head whether ive ever actually taken and career guidance type advice or whether id ever be able to and tbh i think the answer is a resounding "no"- i seem to have to either feel or fall my way into an ongoing place in work matters (which isnt necessarily a negative imo its how i ....well, 'work'

I had one careers advice session with the school’s deputy headmaster. All I remember is that at one point I said I wouldn’t mind being a spy and he just laughed at me.

A high school guidance counselor no joke told a girlfriend of my sister that the aptitude test showed she would make a fantastic circus clown.

Among other paths, mine said I appeared to be pretty smart and might consider becoming a guidance counselor

Remember it well. I Wanted to be a fighter pilot. He wanted me to not be a fighter pilot.

Similar experience with mentioning journalism. Not sure why - it was surely a valid career choice in the 1980s.

Lol our school was too underfunded to have one. I remember they gave us an aptitude test designed by the US Army … it said that I would be great at anything

Same, didn’t have one, took a stupid multiple choice quiz instead.

our equivalent of a Career Guidance Counsellor was the Personal & Social Education teacher. Every week we had an hour of PSE which covered subjects like bullying, assertiveness, sex education, and how to job-seek. This was a different teacher every year. Most of us didn't have this teacher for any specific subject, and therefore they were unqualified to comment on what skills or abilities we had. We had a check-in every year with our PSE teacher to see what we could and should pursue.

Every year except one I got ten mins of "you've got straight As so you can do whatever you want, don't worry" - except I was extremely lacking in streetsmarts and was very awkward. Every year I was told to pursue what I was interested in, but nobody ever warned me about practical concerns like: how competitive an industry can be, or how it's probably better to go to college than uni for certain career paths. Most of the teachers I know went to school, then uni, then taught, and have no actual experience of job-hunting or being made redundant and unemployed, or any of the non-obvious routes. I think it's so strange we ask 14 yr old kids to pick subjects and follow their career based on basically nothing, and the advice we got at my school certainly didn't help.

The exception was Mrs F, who was a Home Ec teacher who I had one year for both Home Ec and PSE. She was wonderful - she recognised that I don't do well with practical stuff but I'm good at theoretical stuff, and I'm good at supporting people with the academic stuff while knowing when to step back and be instructed with hands-on tasks. She gave me great advice, not just about my "career plans" but about how to work with other people and what I would need to do. She made a really astute observation about how I could have easily been a bullying target for being gay and academic but she was never worried about me because she knew I could laugh it all off and disregard the opinions of teenage bigots. I'd love to say thanks to her now.

My brother had my PSE teacher for German one year. At Parents Night she made a comment to my mother about how my younger brother and I are very unalike. My mother went ballistic and told the PSE teacher to never compare us because we are very different people and we're just as worthy as each other, and then put in a complaint about it. I don't know what happened with it but a year later my mother crashed her car into another teacher's vehicle and there was never another Parents Night for either of us again.

That I shouldn't bother applying to the university I wanted to go to because he just knew it'd be too overwhelming for me and I'd fail out the first semester (I did not, in fact I also stayed at that same University for my master's).

Worse though, he told my sister not to bother applying for any colleges because "women always end up barefoot and pregnant, so don't waste your parent's money".

This was about 25 years ago and, astoundingly, he is still somehow employed as a guidance counselor at the same school. I guess that's what being in a small town conservative shithole allows you to get away with.

The guidance/college counsellor at my expensive private high school in 1983 was largely there as an arm of the school's fundraising operation. The school constantly marketed itself with "our top 20 graduating class goes Ivy League or Stanford" and the counsellor largely acted as a liason to ensure that happened. TBF, a lot of those kids came in as a freshman already saying things like "I'm going to go to Cornell and become a doctor" and then doing so. For us outliers, the counsellor was largely useless and ineffective. In our one required, the only suggestion they could come with was "you like to camp and hike in the outdoors - maybe you should go to Humboldt State and get into forestry and being a fire lookout."

Not once during my junior and high school years (1978-1983) did any adult (including my parents) suggest or encourage that I pursue a career in computer programming, networking, music, graphic design, or writing - all of which became my career's orbital points.

We had guidance counselors but I don’t know what they did most of the year. We’d see them in late spring to set up the next year’s classes and that was it.

I took a multiple choice test as a high school sophomore and again at the college advising center - both recommended teacher IIRC, not any specific subject or grade level just teacher. The multiple choice test failed to ask "how do you feel about waking up at 5:45 in the morning every day for the rest of your life?"

My high school’s guidance counselors had to deal with behavioural/psych issues AND career choices in the main student body, but those of us in the top five per cent of the class also had a gifted and talented students’ advocate. The genpop counselors saw every student and made lame college suggestions for me (no, not applying to liberal arts schools in rural Midwestern college towns, thanks). The G&T advocate saw his charges once a week in group and did one hell of a job pestering the colleges we wanted to attend. That year, eight students got accepted to Brown after years of them never taking anyone, plus a couple each at the other Ivies, one MIT and four at Stanford. I didn’t get a single rejection and got full financial aid offers at all of them. Many of my graduating class are still in touch with Joel (the counselor) today.

Among other paths, mine said I appeared to be pretty smart and might consider becoming a guidance counselor
― pseudo echo "funkytown" /dev/null (bendy), mardi 9 septembre 2025 12:40 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Lol, that person clearly felt lonely and needed encouragement. Or it was sarcasm / humor. You could have said: oh I'm much smarter than that.

If I recall correctly, the test I took recommended that I become a dentist. Wish that the 16-year-old wanna-be musician in me hadn't received that a complete joke. Dentists can buy as many guitars as they want.

To answer the thread, I don't remember meeting any guidance counselor except for the one in mandatory school, which was way too early. They had a catalogue to flip through. Literally nothing inspired me, and what is maybe interesting is that 20 years I probably don't have much more clues about how I could have made myself useful. You know, besides getting a bunch of degrees.

At age 38, my first thoughts of cool jobs / trainings to pursue would be:
- Environmental science - I recently spoke to an elderly guy who was in mining but trained as an environmental scientist, at 6am in the morning he schooled me on compost, paper mills, and water management. I could have listened to him all day, I find all this inherently cool. My dad is an engineer. I probably did not realize, at the time when it mattered, that this was a field and that sustainability was not just a global challenge but could mean very concrete things. Natural resources management too.
- Medicine. As a kid, any talk of medical stuff and bodily process would make me queasy. I have also fainted at the sight of blood at least once - as an adult, took me as a complete surprise. On the other hand, I've been asked if I was working in the health sector in hospital because I was asking so many questions out of curiosity when I was just supposed to stick to being a patient. I like reading this stuff, I have a good capacity to memorize, and I have boundless admiration for the dedication - even a GP. Probably was never for me, but one can dream.
- Law. The very last thing I would have chosen at Uni. We used to scoff at those people. Just like I had ignored my father's advice to think beyond the degree. How stupid can a young man be. I ended up marrying someone who studied law - may I add, someone for whom fanciful degrees like we have here were not an option. Today I find there is something fascinating about law, the construction, and I realize you can specialize and leave the rest. Half the jobs seem to be advertized to people with a law background. Could have been useful.
- Anything communication or journalism would have suited me very well. I guess I had no idea how to orient myself.

I should have really hunted down that counselor :p

I have no recollection whatsoever of what a guidance counselor told me in terms of career advice. Kinda blows my mind that anyone remembers decades later? Unless it was particularly wack advice, which is memorable.

I don't remember anything specific, either, but given that I was always college-bound, I have to assume that most conversations I had were just about making sure I was doing all I needed to do to prepare for college, rather than anything career-oriented.

in 1999, i had a personal website, hard coded html, a proto blog, where i would list my favorite bands and how i was feeling that day. the problem was that i was feeling very sad all the time. the website became known among my friends and people started visiting it at the school's library. a couple other people made sites too, and we linked to each other in an early "web ring" or whatever those were called. i called it "loser's anonymous" because i was a sophomore in high school.

the guidance counselor saw it, and without talking to me or any of the people, called all of our parents (including my best friend, whose mom owned the domain we were all using) and said that we in some sort of cult that might be suicidal. columbine had happened earlier in the year and suddenly we all had to wear ID badges at school, and some of my friends wore all black. she shut down the whole thing overnight and made some of the parents cry.

then she called me into her office and said that i was suicidal (no) and possibly homicidal (only toward her lol, jk). i wasn't suicidal, i was just very depressed and needed help.

her actual career advice was based on a long written quesitonairre and it said that waste disposal was my best fit.

she was also fucked up, though - more than one student saw her bottle of gin in the drawer

I spent part of my high school days at a magnet school that had more accelerated classes, but the same building also housed more vocational class programs so the bus between the two campuses had an interesting mix of people.

I think I kind of fell between the cracks because the home high school counselors assumed the smart kid school was lining you up with college advice, but the magnet school had a lot of kids with parents who were strongly guiding them. The most education either of my parents had was a two year associate degree from a community college, with the other parent having dropped out of a state university before completing two years.

I was really stressed in one class during my freshman year of high school -- I just lacked the organizational skills and executive function to concentrate on math homework, and was partially avoidant about the whole thing because I was used to most things coming naturally. I wish I'd had someone to talk to about that, and possibly have been given some guidance.

My experiences were mostly good - senior counselor was so supportive and encouraged me to apply to Harvard and got me an application but I didn't have the nerve to ask my dad for the fee so I threw it out and just went to the school that paid for everything.

Freshman year, though, I told the counselor that I wanted to be an engineer like my dad. He said, "are you good at math?" I said, "no". He said well maybe I should do something else.

Truthfully I was not bad at math - I was headache prone + my dad was a math genius, which is intimidating enough but the math teacher took me off the honors track because my father taught me a different way to do the problems and also I didn't always "show my work". Bad math teachers have been my downfall.

If I recall correctly, the test I took recommended that I become a dentist. Wish that the 16-year-old wanna-be musician in me hadn't received that a complete joke. Dentists can buy as many guitars as they want.

― peace, man, Wednesday, September 10, 2025 6:34 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

jesus, man, have some self-respect! lmao

I can’t even remember what I was told

"If you know so much about making intelligent career choices, how come you're a guidance counselor?" — a line from Matt Groening's Life In Hell that has stayed in my head for 30+ years

I have no idea what mine said. I can remember her face but not her name. I left the office with a bunch of brochures for middling liberal arts colleges halfway across the state from me. Ended up going to the local technical university. Like a lot of 17 year olds I didn't have a clue about what would be good for me post-high school but neither did she, I suspect.

i cannot remember what mine said but whatever his prognosis was, but i know for a fact it certainly did nothing positive for me. all i remember was this feeling that i didn't have a word for then. anxiety.

it was quite a big thing in my school, maybe in ireland in general but idk. i feel like we had time put aside for it in classes and occasional individual meetings with the guidance teacher. there were two or three of them, but the one who taught us was younger, and everyone fancied her, i recall, in an all boys school. i remember she used to compliment our physical appearance, like if you got a haircut or something, i think as a way of sort of stunning adolescent boys into obedience, idk.

we did a lot of tests also, probably enneagram, but also others. i remember doing a test and it came back and said journalist, which was what i wanted to do at that time, so i guess they had some value. but then idk, the job i do now didn't exist when i was in school and i am p well suited to it so it's all broad brush i suppose.

i don't ever really remember guidance teachers overtly telling us what to do, but they would say 'that makes sense' based on the personality tests or other tests. i don't know what they said if you wanted to do something that was the opposite of what the hallowed tests said, but i don't remember people being annoyed with them or it being confrontational.

they also had people come in and talk to us, like past pupils who were doing whatever job, and tbf quite often they tried to get someone who had some roundabout route to what they do now, or could talk about how your results and university are not the be all and end all of what you choose to do, i guess to get across the idea that versatility, openness and some hard work at the right times can lead you to interesting work.

xps zach that is totally fucked up, how dare they twist your effort to build community like that. Shameful.

I like the standardized tests where you can just estimate the answer. No "showing your work"! I aced those.

i remember very little about high school or college regarding "people" or "what happened" or "things i learned" but have strong memories of locations, landscapes, that sort of thing - hence my initials and username.

we didn’t have guidance counselors per se, but we did have college and career counselors. mine was an old queen who taught piano and modern European history who got all the gay kids, whether we were out or not. he once beckoned me into his office and said, “table, what we need are some pink Uzis to kill all these breeders.” (i am not kidding!! i went to a Quaker school, so this was really provocative).

for the senior talent show, he accompanied me on piano to “Mack the Knife.” he also told me to ignore my parents and to go where i wanted to go, which is what i ended up doing.

anyway, he won the US ragtime piano playing competition a few times, gave me his massive collection of showtunes and off-off broadway recording LPs, and stayed a dear friend until he passed in 2014. i miss him!

oh also, my senior year he would invite me and a friend of mine (wink) over and he would smoke joints with us and the three of us would watch AbFab lmfao

in many ways a model for living tbh

that's awesome. we should just have a role models thread tbh