Friday, January 28, 2011

We are career counselling disasters

No no this one!
There is this guy who does bachelors in economics from the Government College University Lahore with distinction. He shifts to Islamabad and does MBA from Quaid-e-Azam university. He gets nostalgic about Lahore and returns to do LLB from Punjab University. Lahore’s hustle and bustle starts disturbing him and he moves to Islamabad again and does LLM from the International Islamic University. He feels a little empty and does masters in criminology. After studying so much, he decides to settle in the life and appears in CSS and gets a job in Pakistan Railways.
If he wanted to do CSS, he could have opted for it right after his bachelors. He wasted eight years of his life and money on studying various disciplines.
We are ages away from career counselling. Most of the professionals around us did not opt for their professions. They accidentally landed in them. My father went to Lahore to become a primary school teacher, but somehow landed in law of which he had developed an aptitude. Right now he has a large clientele and is a successful trial lawyer by many ways.
Following my father’s 'golden' footsteps, I went to Islambad’s National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES) – commonly known as FAST - to do software engineering. After spending two years in the university, I realised that I didn't have any aptitude for computers and I quit the degree half way. I came to Lahore and started working in Daily Times and studying law. Me and my father have a slight edge over the guy as we only wasted a couple of years contrary to him wasting eight years.

2 comments:

  1. Its so true. I have complete MS-CS from NUCES (ISB) but my romance with "hard-sciences" ended a long ago. I also wanted to study social sciences esp. Law but I couldnt gather enough courage to convince my parents for a discipline/career change.

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  2. Our securing good marks in intermediate becomes a curse for us. A student can't even think of studying social sciences in bachelors when he has obtained good marks in intermediate. My parents, especially my father, supported me. It took me ten minutes to write a letter to him and he took 2 minutes in reading it and accepting it.

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