It's incredibly overwhelming, and almost crazy, to expect 17 year old students to know exactly what they want their future to look like. This fact is not aided by university websites offering confusing information for prospective students and for every person to give different and conflicting information about university.
While a lot of the advice may be incredibly helpful for some students and for some degrees, it's important to try to not let the stress of choosing degrees while studying hard for your HSC and trials get to you. The most important things to do is to break up all of your worries into bite sized pieces and begin attacking them.
For me, the most confusing thing for a long time was what career path I should pick as I had such a large range of ideas: commercial pilot, criminology, project management, mechanical engineering, education etc etc. And while over time the list began weeding itself out, I found that the most helpful thing for me was to create a mindmap of all of the jobs that I was considering and outlining the future that I could have with each of them.
For example, a commercial pilot offered a high salary and a job which included plenty of travel, however the degree itself included a lot of physics (with which I struggle) and I worried that travelling too much would be too draining for me.
Further, criminology is something which has interested me for years, with true crime documentaries being on constant rotation. However, I struggled to connect with the job aspect of criminology and couldn't truly picture myself working at crime scenes.
As I kept weeding through my list, I finally landed on project management, but I knew that I could only pursue that successfully if I already had a solidified job. Upon studying chemistry for the HSC, I discovered that chemical engineering was something that I felt truly passionate about, and decided that the degree itself included many courses which truly interested me.
It's important to consider what you are truly interested in, rather than overcomplicating salaries and job prospects because, at the end of the day, if you are passionate about something and are willing to put in the work, then you will make it to where you want to be. But, don't stress if you haven't sorted everything out just yet, studying at university is never something which 'expires' and changing degrees part way through is also possible. You may also find that further study is not for you! The thing that I recommend the most is to just ask yourself "where can I picture myself happiest?" and make that happen. Don't stress, you've got this!
