I've seen it when I was still in school and I've seen it when I was working at a school. The divide between students who already knew what they wanted to pursue in the future and those who were just along for the ride was about 20-80 in favor of the latter. Yet all these kids end up somewhere. Whether that be college/university or a job in a factory, they all eventually reach some place in life.

It took me a while but I finally realized what career I wanted to pursue the second year after I graduated from High School. That's later than most but it's not the most insane thing I've seen. People can do complete 180s when they're studying one thing that they suddenly don't like anymore.

What about you? Did you already know what you wanted to be later in life or did you make a decision on the fly and run with it? What about those still unsure of what path to take, what are some of the obstacles you're faced with?

I pretty much knew what I wanted to do from the start. When I first went into high school, during our first day off which was only like 2 weeks into the year, my agency took us to St. John's University for a tour. On that day I found out that Sports Management was a major and I told myself that this was what I wanted to do.

4 years from that date, I was a freshman at St. John's (practically the same date I joined vizzed) and I was going for sports management. I only stayed there for a year because it was too expensive but I did get a degree in sports management and now I'm going for another degree in the same field, more than 9 years after I started high school.

Right now I still want to get a job that relates to either degree in the same field.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I was in high school. I knew I wanted to go to college, but I didn't know what I wanted to study. At first I thought I might want to be a journalist, but after thinking about it for a while I decided that's not what I wanted to do.

I thought for sure I was going to be an engineer when I first started looking at colleges. I even went to visit MIT, because it's one of the best engineering schools in the world and I had the SAT score to get in. Then I realized I hate math so maybe engineering wasn't the best idea.

I thought about teaching for a bit, because I love working with kids, but teachers get paid very little outside of New York, and I don't want to live in New York later in life.

Now I'm thinking I want to be a lawyer, and that seems like what I'm going to go with. Who knows though, I may go to law school and end up hating it.

I'd also really like to be a professional poker player but I don't really see that happening.

When I was in High School I honestly had no clue what I wanted to do. I wanted good grades and that's about it. Granted in the United States that's really all school is for you hardly learn anything anymore. Just memorize it for a test! But I did end up getting all good grades and graduating. I didn't know what I was supposed to do afterwards, however.

I was given freedom and I think I was fairly institutionalized by school. Without the hours and work/homework and rules being imposed on myself I didn't know what to do. I decided to try going into the US Army and got through basic training. When moving onto the Individual Training at an actual base in Texas, I was like wow. This is a lot more discipline than I was expecting. Obviously so. I ended up kind of wimping out of it (because the discipline and ranking system made my anxiety explode) and leaving fairly soon after that.

I moved in with some friends and lived with them for a while. I'm currently wondering if I should go to community college or go back into the Army since I'm not really doing anything with my life right now. It's kind of odd and scary to not be doing anything because I feel like my life has no cause and I'm living just to breathe.

Currently, though, I have no Idea what I want to do. It's something I think I should have figured out a long time ago but never did and I'll always regret that.

I would place myself in my own category. There were those who had no idea what they wanted to do, those who did and focused on that and then there was me, the guy who was very ambitious and wanted to do a bunch of completely different things at the same time. It was to the point where it could be interpreted as me not really knowing what I wanted to do at all.

I had a lot of subjects that interested me during high school and I always knew I wanted to go to university. I liked learning and stood out as academically inclined at least in comparison to the rest of my family, who had shown little interest in school when younger. That made it expected of me to pursue that after high school ended.

For one I was considering pursuing a Computer Science major for a long time but eventually dropped that because I wanted to avoid the math. I also became interested in biology, more specifically genetics and neuroscience and the biological processes affecting our behavior. Having spent a long time learning basic Japanese and reading about Japanese history and culture, the thought of a Japanese major also came to mind but I eventually decided against that because of questioning what actual job prospects it would give me. I had also always had an interest studying humans in different social contexts which lead me into thinking about several different social science related majors. I eventually settled for a joint program in Political Science/Economics, but unwilling to give up on my Japanese studies I also decided to pursue that through another course. I've also done a lot of self studying within psychology and philosophy stemming from my other interests.

In the end it's both something I enjoy and slightly regret. It's nice being able to do many different things, that way I won't have to wonder about what would happen had I taken another path. In a way it also helps keep my options open as I'm not locking myself completely into going for a specific career. On the other hand it's very taxing to study completely different subjects at the same time. In a world where you're expected to niche yourself to reach success it, it can be very challenging, something I came to grips with during my first term. Combine this with pursuing a lot of non academic interests (keeping fit, improving my interpersonal skills, this site) and work, I often get the feeling that I might be spreading myself too thin. Comparing this to the situation I was in during high school though where I often felt I was wasting my time doing nothing, I still feel much more comfortable where I am now. The feeling of productivity and purpose it gives was always something I looked for in the past and I finally found it.

I did know what I wanted to do, but it isn't what I'm doing now. I think I still would like to go into the medical field, and being an engineer specifically for prosthetic limbs still sounds like a really cool job, but I've had to drop it. Now I'm going into Computer Sciences, most likely on the cybersecurity side of things.

I definitely regret giving up on what I was working on before, but I just don't think I'm ready for all of the classes that the field I want to study has in stock for me. I probably could have tried a little harder than I did, but it's too late to turn back now. Maybe once I finish this degree and have a well paying job I can go back and get a degree somewhere in a medical field as well.

You know thinking back while I said I knew what I wanted to do before graduating high school or rather what I wanted to do after graduating High school, I really didn't and was just saying I was going to college only to appease my grandmother and father which ultimately I did end up going to college and got a degree In a career field that I don't work in and honestly didn't have an interest in, so no I didn't know what I wanted to do but I ultimately did what made everyone but myself happy but it all worked out in the end I got a job I enjoy, my dream car that I wanted as a teenager and a family my son and girlfriend. But if I could do it over again I'd actually sit down and think about what I'd want to do and research a carrer that I was actually interested in.

I certainly didn't want to be a janitor. I still don't.
Luckily, I'm planning on being an author. I had no preconceived notion of being an author in high-school.