| Article Index |
|---|
| Post-Grad Plans |
| Read the Advice |
| All Pages |
Dear Jellybean,
I'm going to be graduating in a couple months and my plans for after high school aren't really in my parents agenda. They want me to go to college and become a therapist but instead I want to surf the coastline of California, and also hopefully open my own coffee shop a little later. I know I wont be making a lot of money and I'll probably be broke but I don't really want to be rich or drive fancy cars, I don't really care for materialistic things. Every time I tell them of my plans they just laugh like its a joke and talk about what schools I should go to. I'm almost out of school and there starting to sign me up for schools even though I say no. I don't know what to do! please help!
Dear Writer,
Is becoming a therapist your plan or theirs? That's a pretty specific thing for parents to want for their kid. If you talked about being a therapist in the past, your parents might suspect that you really want to do that, but are balking at the work involved, and your plan to travel and open a coffee shop is just about that. If this is the case, you might want to talk to your wishes for next year as a "year off", instead of your plan for your entire future. After all, after the year is up, you either will or won't have saved up some money, and gotten closer to your coffee shop goals, and at that time you can decide whether to keep on going with what you're doing, or to go back to school like your parents want.
(Hint - in general, it's way easier to argue for a short-term need, than to get other people to commit to agreeing with a huge, long-term scheme).
So why not apply to some schools now? If you get accepted, you can always "defer" the acceptance a year (put it on hold). That will make your parents happy now, and help to reassure them - if you go through with taking the year to do what you want - that you're not saying "never" to going to school, just "Not now".
