With the ever-evolving variety of majors, fields, and career pathways available to students, it can be hard to answer that age-old question: what do you want to be when you’re older? Balancing schoolwork and extracurriculars while figuring out what your ideal future looks like is undeniably difficult. But for seniors, juniors, and even sophomores, the time to be proactive about our future is now—and that can be an intimidating prospect. Fortunately, for any student who, like me, finds themselves questioning what they want to do with their lives, CB West is conveniently providing a series of career pathway presentations that explore aspirations of all kinds, hosted in room A211 during Learn 2. This month students are in for quite a treat!

November’s lineup is nothing short of eye-opening: Septa and Wegmans opportunities, manufacturing for defense and aerospace, forensic toxicology, data analysis, and industry relations. I had the opportunity to not only attend some of them, but have inspiring conversations with several of the speakers, whose stories resonate with lots of the struggles highschoolers commonly face when deciding their futures. Most notably, every single guest speaker that I spoke with had similar advice for those who find themselves undecided amongst what seems like a sea of students with a perfectly planned future. And that is?

“Stay true to you,” asserts the rep for the field of forensic toxicology. “It can be really easy to give into the pressure of your parents to follow in their footsteps or go into something that has a high salary even though you aren’t passionate about it.” Like many CB West students, this speaker struggled with choosing what she wanted to spend her life doing. “Taking chemistry and forensics in high school was the kicker for me. I don’t think I really ever knew the specifics of what I wanted to do until much later, but I loved those classes so much that everything else ended up kind of falling into place.” This sentiment was echoed by other speakers, who all confirmed that the most important step in the process of deciding what you want to do in the future is first learning what matters to YOU!

Overall, while I knew from the get-go that some of these pathways were not the one for me, each presentation I attended was worthwhile and quite enlightening. Seeing accomplished people speak so passionately about their career fostered an important internal conversation – what makes me happy?

But if this month’s presentations don’t appeal to you, don’t worry! There are plenty more career pathway presentations that CB West will host throughout this year, designed to accommodate the many interests of our unique student body. For more information or to sign up for late November or December’s equally fascinating options, check the Lunch & Learn Canvas page – let’s think positive about our future!