‘It’s ok not to have a plan at all’: Frances Whiting’s advice to the class of 2023

Don’t know what to do when Year 12 finishes? Have no plan for the future? Don’t stress, is Frances Whiting’s advice.

Plans don’t always work out the way you thought they would, so don’t worry if you don’t have a plan for what you are going to do when you finish high school.

What do you want to do? Do you know what you want to study? Do you think you’ll take a gap year? What about TAFE? Or a trade? Nothing wrong with doing a trade,
they make more money than the rest of us put together.

Or what about not going to uni at all? Some of the world’s most successful people don’t have a degree. Look at Bill Gates.

You have to get a degree – you might not even use it, but it’s good to have something to fall back on.

And so it goes, the yearly chorus that adult voices – mine included – break into the moment we spot an unsuspecting Year 12 student in our midst.

The ink is barely dry on most school leavers’ ATAR examinations, and yet we, for reasons we don’t quite understand (but all of them, I suspect, to do with our own life choices) are determined to wrest their future plans from them in 25 words or less.

From now until the end of the year, at every single social event they haven’t been able to wriggle out of, these students know what’s coming – boredom.

But apart from that, something else too – lots of adults asking them the same questions …

“Andrew! Nice to see you! Is that a mullet? I bet your mother loves that. Anyway, any idea of what you’re going to do next year?”

We all ask this question as adults, even though we know full well how much it annoyed us when we were teenagers.

Frances Whiting. Picture: David Kelly

I do it every time I see a friend’s son or daughter who’s about to graduate. As I said, I am not entirely sure why, but I think it’s because we know.

We know, now, don’t we? We know that if we were to spread out our lives like a traveller’s map on a table, spread it right out and trace its course with our fingertips, we could see it all.

How this decision led us here. How this one took us there. How this crossing made us stumble. This one made us grow. How taking the road less travelled, or the multi-lane freeway worked out. How who we chose to travel with made all the difference. How we got hopelessly lost. How we found our way back. How it all matters.

And I think we ask these questions of our teenagers because we are excited and scared for them at the same time. We want to hear that they have a plan, that they know where they’re going, because we know what it’s like out there.

But we forget, as we get older, the good parts of getting it wrong. Of how taking a wrong turn can lead us to exactly where we are meant to be.

I think that’s what we should be talking to our school leavers about. Not about their ATARs and career pathways and GPAs.

I think we should speak with them about the other, equally important stuff. How it’s okay if your plans don’t work out the way you thought they would.

How it’s okay not to have a plan at all. And how, in the words of the greatest teenage philosopher of all time, Mr F. Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it.”