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I don't. But the best way to figure out what you want to do is to actually do it. School does not help in this process.

I'm three years out of college. Most of my friends had no idea what they wanted to do in graduation. They picked a job, didn't like it, and now are switching. Except now the biological clocks are ticking, and it's becoming more important to pick the right path, because there is a major costs in switching careers.

If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family.



But the best way to figure out what you want to do is to actually do it. School does not help in this process.

I would say that school does help. It exposes people to different ideas and topics (Wait, I can get paid to do something with math besides run a business? You mean I can spend my entire life researching something?).

Personally, my opinion is that its absolutely great to know a lot about your specific field that you (want to) work in. But I would never want to limit myself to only knowing about one particular topic of knowledge.

//edit (to reply to this bit): If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family

There's a lot of careers that require years of training to go through before you can begin working. Lawyers, Doctors, etc. We on HN might like to think that anyone can pick up a profession and just hack away and be able to make a living at it on whim. But it doesn't work like that. Its not as simple as deciding "I don't like being a lawyer, but I think I'd like being a farmer. I'm going to buy some land, plant seeds and call it a day".


Re:Law and Medicine. The US system for both of these is EVIL in its regressivness and waste of time and talent. Most other Common Law countries have undergraduate law degrees, in the UK they're mostly three years. There is also bugger all reason for Medicine to be a graduate degree, it's all taught. Bond University in Australia does an undergrad medicine programme in 4y 5m, with three trimesters per year, and the UK system has undergrad Med degrees of 5 or 6 years.




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