I had an hour long conversation with my oldest nephew this morning who is now phase of selecting a major and college in India, and wanted some college advice from me. He has two choices - one is a nationally ranked university in an not-super-in-demand major, while another admit is in a locally known but not ranked university, but in a field that super-hot-in-demand. The perennial question being, Which college and major should I choose? Should i chose better ranked university or a in-demand major from a job perspective?
I switched around the question and asked him “What do YOU want to do? What are you interested in?", to which his response was “I dont know!". The response was such a quintessentially 18 year old Indian student response at the steps of college. Most of us pretty much up grew up with no particular direction, focus or interest in mind. It all boiled down to how well we did in our 12th grade exams, and that determined whether we did engineering or medicine. 20 years thence, no matter what a majority of us have done decently well for ourselves due to that simple choice.
Compared to that, I wish my almost 13 year old felt that kind of freedom and clarity to say “I dont know!”. Education system out here is so needlessly fucking complicated that my kid probably needs to determine in next 1 year what her eventual trajectory and career choice will be and plan out her path & portfolio leading towards it. While I do appreciate the freedom and independence that kids have her to pursue their own interests, more often than not as I am seeing constantly around here too, the best paying jobs are only in a few categories, perhaps a few more than India, but still few. I wish I had the luxury of telling my kid, Dont worry, just get done with SAT and then we’ll determine what you want to do next!. Honestly I think the number one reason why so many folks in this country are so edgy and anxious all the time can be traced back to absolutely crappy K12 education system in USA.
Anyway, back to my nephew, my advice was being an Indian it didnt matter what major he chose, ultimately he is going to end up either doing his masters and joining a tech company, or finish his engineering in whatever major to only join a tech company! So from my point of view I was like might as well go for an in-demand major at a not so great university and call it a day.