Didn’t get the ATAR or uni offer you wanted? It might be a dream come true | Tom Bowden
This is what falling short of your high school or uni course targets really looks like, writes Tom Bowden.
Opinion
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Remember when you were at school and you knew what you wanted to be for the rest of your life?
So from about year 10 you picked all the prerequisite subjects you needed for a course you had your heart set on studying after high school so you could go on and land your dream job?
Me neither.
That was never me.
I dreaded the day our year 12 results came out.
Not just because I wasn’t the greatest student in the school – my TER, now ATAR (driven by the fact that I chose my year 12 subjects based on the ratio of girls to boys in the class) would serve as empirical evidence of this – but because it meant I didn’t really know where I was going from there.
I wasn’t smart enough to be a doctor. Not strong enough to be a fireman, nor good-looking enough to be a model and probably borderline too old to be one of those Anne Geddes babies.
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I had friends that were lucky enough to always have a clear vision as to what they wanted to be from an early age and worked towards achieving it their entire education.
I’ll let you in on a secret – a lot of them aren’t doing their dream job anymore.
I’ve got friends that are no longer architects, doctors, teachers, police officers, engineers or ambulance officers.
Why? Because it turned out their dream job wasn’t their dream job after all.
We have a fairly romantic view of what working life will be like based largely on what we see in the media.
We think we know what the daily duties of a particular occupation will be like and we have a certain expectation of how long a career we might expect to have in that chosen field.
Here’s the kicker.
We’re expected to make a decision about which one of these is for us at the age of about 17. A solid six years before, a government paper tells me, the female brain is fully developed and about 13 years before a male one’s done.
We start picking subjects to facilitate this career pathway several years before then.
But here’s the thing.
For the most part, that whole idea of ‘you pick a job, you study for that job, you get that job and you work 40 years in that job before you retire with a gold watch and then die a few years later because your body’s never experienced anything but work and doesn’t know how to relax’ – that thinking’s kind of outdated.
A US study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (their spelling, that’s not me not knowing the difference between work and a political party) revealed Gen Zers will likely end up working 18 jobs across their six careers in their lifetime.
Six careers.
So if your Year 12 results aren’t quite what you’d envisaged, you didn’t get the uni offer you were hoping for last week, or you missed the ATAR cut-off for a course you wanted to do, just know it’s not the end of the world.
Some people’s path into their dream job is a straight line. For others it’s more complex. It’s a long and winding road, as The Beatles said. And they were never wrong. Although I’m still trying to figure out, “They are the eggmen, I am the walrus” …
It took me eight years after I finished year 12 to figure out what my dream job was and I can now happily say I’ve been doing it for the past 14 years.
We get there in the end.
Also, just know you don’t have to go to university to make a difference and change the world.
You don’t even have to be the best at something.
Find something that makes you happy and do it.
If in doing it you make life a little easier, happier or brighter for others, all the better.
You’ve got all the time in the world.
You’re young. You’ll figure it out.
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Originally published as Didn’t get the ATAR or uni offer you wanted? It might be a dream come true | Tom Bowden