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Tafkam Hokie

Joined: 10/07/1999 Posts: 35179
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Speaking from experience, it is easy to tell your child that


what is hard is telling other people you told your child that.

Since I have both a bachelors and masters degree and have a good job in a STEM field, everyone assumes my children will go the same route. But to be blunt, my son is NOT college material. School has always been a bit of a struggle for him, and that has always been tough for me to grasp since I was good at it.

As a parent, I am not going to pressure him to do something that will (a) cost a fortune, (b) won't work, and (c) will make him miserable.

But where he struggles with book-learning, he excels at hands-on learning. What he really wants is to join the Air Force and learn to be an avionics mechanic. And I couldn't be prouder.

But that is a career path that for some reason is difficult to defend among my peers. As soon as I say military, people automatically ask if he is going for the GI Bill or if he wants to go to college to be an officer. No, not really. He wants to actually work on airplanes, not supervise people who work on airplanes. He just wants to enlist.

If anything, that makes me even more proud that he knows what he wants to do, has a plan to do it, and isn't planning to spend $100K to get some useless hipster degree that only makes him qualified to work at a coffee shop. But there are an awful lot of people in this world (especially my age and older) who still think that a kid who doesn't go to college is a failure in life.

(In response to this post by ElbertoHokie)

Posted: 08/02/2018 at 11:45AM


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