“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
We ask kids this question constantly. At the dinner table. In classrooms. At family gatherings where someone inevitably suggests becoming a doctor.
I understand the intention. We want young people to dream big and think about their futures. But we often ask them to choose a future before they’ve had a chance to experience the possibilities.
How would a student know whether they enjoy engineering, automotive design, healthcare or machining if they’ve never met someone doing that work, visited a workplace or tried it themselves?
A job title is a pretty thin foundation for a life decision. We owe students more to work with.
My parents sacrificed a great deal to build a new life in this country. For them, a traditional professional career offered a clear route to stability and opportunity. I entered college convinced I would become a doctor or a lawyer. A summer internship at a law firm helped resolve the lawyer question fairly quickly. I experienced the work and realized it wasn’t for me.
Medicine took longer. I stayed pre-med throughout college, with little practical exposure to what practicing medicine actually involved. By the time I recognized that it wasn’t my path either, I’d invested significant time, energy and resources.
Thankfully, Teach For America opened another door. In the classroom, I discovered the work that would shape my career: helping young people from under-resourced communities access opportunities that could change their lives.
I found that direction by doing the work. That experience is why our staff hears me say this so often: sometimes learning what you don’t like is every bit as valuable as discovering what you love.
An internship that helps a student rule out a career can be a very successful internship. The earlier that discovery happens, the more time they have to explore another direction.
Those findings should prompt us to examine the opportunities students have to learn about their futures. It’s hard to make an informed choice about something you barely know exists.
At TGR Foundation, our mission is to empower students to pursue their passions through education. That begins with giving them meaningful opportunities to explore.
Career discovery has been part of our flagship TGR Learning Lab in Anaheim since it opened in 2006. Fifth graders encounter STEAM subjects through field trips. Middle and high school students can explore more than 30 courses through after-school programming. Across our Learning Labs, some experiences begin as early as second grade.
A student might come for a workshop, return to try drones or multimedia, and eventually develop a deeper interest in engineering or design. Along the way, they gain information about the work and about themselves.
Do I enjoy solving this kind of problem? Do I like working with my hands? What happens when a project gets difficult? Am I curious enough to keep going?
Our partnership with Find Your Grind Foundation adds another way for students to examine their interests, discover related careers, and understand the steps those careers require. Its platform and curriculum help connect what students learn about themselves with possibilities they can explore firsthand.
The goal is to give students enough experience to make their own choices with confidence.
This past summer, TGR Foundation provided 193 high school students in Southern California and Philadelphia with intensive college- and career-readiness experiences through partnerships with 11 universities and businesses.
Among them, 85 participated in our Career Explorer Academy, exploring engineering, healthcare, computer science and digital media. Students met professionals, built skills, and visited workplaces including Genesis Design Studio, 2K Visual Concepts Studio, Snap Inc. and St. Jude Medical Center.
At the Genesis Design Studio, students could see how an initial sketch becomes a three-dimensional vehicle—and how design, engineering and technology come together to make that happen. That gives “automotive design” a meaning a course catalog never could.
A student might leave thinking, “I want to do this.” Another might discover that engineering interests them more than design. Someone else might realize they’d rather explore an entirely different field. Each leaves with more information than they arrived with.
And meaningful learning depends on the environment around those experiences. Students need room to ask questions, make mistakes and admit that something isn’t clicking. They need adults who notice their interests and help them take the next step.
The research captures something we see in our work: learning feels more meaningful when students can connect it to their interests and have people helping them navigate it.
None of us follows a perfectly straight path. Interests evolve. Jobs change. Life has a habit of ignoring the plan. But the cost of changing direction varies enormously.
Some young people can switch majors, take an unpaid internship, move home or spend another year figuring things out. Others need to earn money immediately and help cover rent, groceries or family expenses.
For those students, an uninformed choice can cost more than a semester. It can mean debt, lost income or having to put education on hold. Early exploration gives them a chance to test assumptions while the stakes are lower.
That’s why I care so much about helping students discover their interests. Passion becomes useful when students understand the work, the preparation it requires, the opportunities it offers, and whether they want to pursue it. We should give them that information before asking them to make expensive commitments.
One field trip can spark an interest. Sustaining it takes more. When a student gets excited about a career, our next question should be: “What can we help you do next?”
A career panel might lead to a workshop. A workshop might lead to an industry challenge or workplace visit. From there, a student could pursue job shadowing, an internship, a credential or an apprenticeship. The route will differ by student and field. But the experiences should connect.
That is the journey we’re strengthening at TGR Foundation: exploration to skills, skills to credentials and opportunity to thrive in school, careers and life.
Employers have an important role here. A workplace visit can make an unfamiliar career tangible. A professional who explains their own path can help a student understand the choices ahead. A well-designed internship can give that student experience, confidence and someone willing to make an introduction.
These contributions help young people build professional relationships that many of their peers already access through family and friends. I’ve seen students earn the right degree and still struggle to get started because they had little work experience and knew no one in their field. They needed someone who could answer a question, review a résumé, explain how hiring worked or help them get through the first door.
Those relationships are part of career preparation. They’re also part of why students return to our Labs. Equipment and interesting classes may bring them through the door. The people they meet give them reasons to keep coming back.
Young people still have work to do. They must make choices, practice, persevere and take responsibility for their futures. An interest is a beginning; developing it takes effort. Our responsibility is to make sure they have a fair chance to begin.
As educators, employers and community leaders, we can give students meaningful experiences, honest information and people who will help them move forward. We can make more careers visible and more pathways accessible.
So keep asking kids what they want to be. But ask what they’ve tried, who they’ve met, what surprised them and what they want to explore next.
Their answers may change. Mine certainly did.
What matters is that, over time, those answers come from experience—and that there is a next step they can actually take.
