craigmcn

Another post stemming from a discussion with friends and family. (And isn’t this little guy cute? I’m borrowing this picture from clickpets.co.uk.)

We were discussing post-secondary education (hence the neat title) and that my friends are considering trying to convince their kids to take a year off after high school to figure things out.

As a university graduate and current employee of a university, you might expect me to be strongly in favour of university, but I’m not. I really think a year off is the best plan. Go get a job (or two) that’s kind of crappy, learn about working, paying taxes, being an adult, then go to university, or community college, or do whatever you want to do.

One of my friends’ concerns was that, by taking a year off, one of the kids wouldn’t want to go back to school. But I think that after three or five years of crummy, menial, retail work, he might change his mind. Or it might not, and he’ll be happy.

Once you’re out in the world, you get to find out a lot of things that you don’t want to do, and that’s probably the hardest part of figuring out how to be happy. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars are a pretty high price to pay to find out you want to be a welder and not a biochemist.