I'm clueless about my future

I have just finished my GCSEs and am expecting good grades (5+ A*s)
I have picked my A level choices to be Maths, Chemistry, Biology and Geography, because those are the subjects I enjoy out of the options in my sixth form.
However, I'm not sure what these A levels lead to, and I'm absolutely clueless about what degree or what career I want to pursue in the future.
My question is:
How do you decide what degree you want to do? Does it come to you during sixth form, or do you have to do work experience in order to gain understanding about certain jobs?

Reply 1

Arvin Bhambra

Original post by Baaah

go to a career meeting at school. They should help you get a path with the subjects you have chosen.

Reply 2

username1884577

I had my life planned out since the age of 14 haha.

It totally depends. Mine came to be from personal experience (Clinical psychology). However, if you have no idea what you want to do then it's mainly research.

Decide what aspects of a subject you like, and then research possible jobs that involve it. For example in biology, I'm really into degenerative disorders and the brain, which is why I want to specialise in neuropsychology.

Your A levels are good choices for keeping doors open.

Reply 3

veni_vidi_vasi

The A-Levels you are choosing narrow down the playing field a bit. A careers seminar like suggested above or a careers fair are also very useful for narrowing the field further. (e.g: do you want to go into biomed, engineering, environment etc.) Once you've worked out the field of areas, getting some work experience would be useful either to rule out future careers and/or to choose a career that you feel you like the look of.

The other option is to choose a degree that you like the look of (note the word degree, not university) and then work out what you can do with that degree.

To be honest, no-one in my year had a clue what they wanted to do at university, and some still don't know what they want to pursue as a career. I'm in Y13.

Reply 4

StationToStation

It's important to remember that you probably won't have some sort of revelatory experience where all stars align and suddenly everything makes sense. Deciding on a career path is a process with many many different ways to do it; some people know their future occupation at the age of 5 and others when they finish their university degree; some people make the decision after 10 minutes of online research while others spend years trying to make a well-informed choice. There isn't necessarily a wrong or a right way to do this.

I'd suggest starting with asking yourself some basic questions. Do you want to work with people or alone? Do you want to, for example, focus on a narrow field of academics or do broad things not necessarily linked to a subject in a straight-forward way? Do you want to care for people or do you perhaps want to teach them? How important is salary or regular hours to you? What exactly is it that interests you in the subjects you mentioned?

Another thing to try is to just explore university courses and other possibilities in as broad a way as possible. Remember that you don't have to know what work you exactly want to do after graduating if you find a course that sounds fascinating to you; opportunities usually start to unfold as you progress with the degree. You could also try talking to your teachers and parents about your options, and getting work experience in different fields is obviously also a good way to inform yourself. :smile:

Hope this helps, and the best of luck with everything!

Reply 5

cmcdonald

It's important at a level to just do the subjects that you enjoy so it's good that you've done that, your future career plans just depend on each person e.g. I knew that I wanted to be a marketing manager since I can remember but some of my friends still don't know what they want to do and we are off to uni next year.
Even though your current a level choices are quite science based don't worry cuz that still leaves your uni choices wide open, universities just look for the grades in 3 a levels so it doesn't matter what subjects you do. And to be honest employers don't actually care about what degree you do all they care about is that you are knowledgeable and that you are able to learn new things, like that DJ from radio 1 he did a history degree at uni and now he is on the radio, so even uni doesn't narrow down your choices