Interest In A Human Service Career example essay topic

830 words
Many people think that they are not college material when struggling the first couple of years. Not being able to set their goals and know what they want to be could be very frustrating for them. College helps you figure out who you really are and who you want to be. Not all college students will know exactly what they want to study after high school, not all college students will know during college.

By exploring different classes and careers you will find out what makes you happy. Happiness varies from person to person. For one person having a career they love will bring happiness, for others money is the only means of their happiness. Happiness comes from the persons standards and goals a person has set for themselves. Happiness is reached when goals are accomplished or are on pursuit of being achieved. When in high school most students are trying to personally develop on who they are.

Once they are in college they start to develop personally on whey will be, and what they plan on doing for the rest of their lives. I like many students did not know what to do out of high school, I wanted to go off to college with my friends but my parents had other plans. They knew I was not ready for a four-year college. They knew me better than I knew myself, if I had gone straight to a university I would have made the same mistakes I made here at Imperial Valley College. My first year here at IVC I had no interest in classes, I was mostly interested in hanging out with my friends.

It took me a year and a half of messing around to figure out what I wanted to do. When I had a moment of enlightenment on my future it was in my elected human relations class. During the semester we would visit the career center often searching professions that are available. There was a program that we would use called Eureka that was like an assessment test on what might like to do as a career. It would ask an endless number of questions on your likes and dislikes. You would input on what goals you might have for yourself such as how much money you would like to make, how many hours you wanted to work, and what kind of settings you would work in.

By having all this information the program would give you a list of about 15 or so careers that might interest the user. Each of these careers had a brief description of the pay, duties, and conditions. I remember two of them catching my eye, probation counseling and cable installation. We had to write a ten-page research paper on a career and I chose to research a probation counselor's career instead of the cable installers. I had to find out in detail what the tasks, pay, education needed, and many other things related to the profession. I found out there was a big difference between a probation consoler major and a human service major.

The biggest one was that a probation consoler only could work in a juvenile facility. Then I also learned that a probation agent's career was very different from the probation consoler's career. I saw that the probation agent's career was better suited for me because of the education needed as well as the job settings. As a probation agent you mostly work on the field meaning you will not be cooped up in a detention center all day. I could never be in a office for a full forty hours a week. Therefore checking up on the workload of clients given to me would be perfect for my likes.

Thanks to the program I was able to see these differences and how my standards matched with the career. Eureka is a good name for is because that is the way a felt when I figured out I wanted a career in human services. If college was biggest goal was to prepare a person for a career no electives would be allowed. A student would be given a list of technical classes need for his profession and he would complete the curriculum.

By having some choices students can explore themselves and their interests to develop who they truly are, not defined just by a career. If I did not have the choice to take that human relations class I would have never would have found interest in a human service career. There is a certain curriculum that every career has in order to complete its degree, but there is also a general curriculum that allows these elective courses that helps us walk around other options.