Preparing for Life After High School
Now What do You Do?
If you’ve stayed with us this far, good for you! Hopefully, you now have a better sense of who you are and what you should do next. In these last three chapters, we will give you the tools to make the best of the time you have left before graduation. We will offer you some guidelines for how to optimize the time you spend preparing yourself for whatever comes next and, finally, we will present a framework in which you can situate yourself and your future.
Despite our efforts to the contrary, we know that some of you will follow the swarm to university and will join those who actually should be there. For that reason — and, frankly, because that’s where our experience is strongest — we are going to focus here on the ways in you can best prepare yourself for university. It is important to remember, though, that the suggestions we are making here also are relevant — in some way — to any of the paths open to you. Becoming good at math, for example, may not seem to be particularly important to you if you’re setting out to travel or committing yourself to a year of volunteerism. But the disciplined, rigorous thinking needed for advanced math can help you to organize your efforts so that you achieve your desired outcome.
Are You Ready for Success?
Let’s assume that you have passed the curiosity test and made the decision to go to university — a decision made alone, with your parents, or as a result of broader pressure to attend. The next question that arises logically is this: are you ready? We are sorry to have to tell you that, for large numbers of young people, the answer is no. Coming to university when you are not fully prepared is a really bad idea that can lead to a great deal of unhappiness. However, coming when you are keen and ready can be a real joy. Preparation helps, as does self-awareness.
Here are the top five conditions for success at university:
• High school grades are important, though they are not guarantees of success. The research shows that high-achieving high school students do well in university. Students who come to university with an average in the mid to high eighties will, in general, do well — though their grades will likely fall substantially (two-thirds of first-year students get lower grades than they did in their last year of high school).[1] While individual circumstances vary, students who come to university with a high school average of 75 percent or lower have a fairly small chance of succeeding in their studies, and many of those with less than 80 percent will also struggle. Time and effort spent in high school do pay off.
• English or French language writing ability is one of the most important predictors of career success. There are no short-cuts here. You must be able to read and write effectively. This is one of the greatest shortcomings of today’s university students. Too many students devote great effort to their mathematical and scientific skills and much less to writing. This is a huge mistake. Learn to write well. If your mother tongue is other than English or French, we are impressed with your ability to learn another language or two. But students with English as a Second Language often have serious problems at the university level, where tolerance for bad grammar, poor spelling, and awkward sentence construction is typically very low. Don’t rush to university if you barely passed the English or French language entrance standard.
• Mathematics matters. All high school students wanting to get into top university programs should have completed academic mathematics courses through to grade twelve, including calculus if available. There are two major reasons for doing so. First, numeracy matters and is of fundamental importance to many of the fastest-growing, best-paying careers around — from such obvious scientifically based fields as nanotechnology to areas such as finance, accounting, and economics. Second, mathematics is a very good indication of overall intellectual ability. Math is challenging, tricky, innovative, and creative. Other courses in high school have similar qualities, but you do not require high-end skills to get top grades in many of them. If you can do well in math (and not simply by taking the same course two or three times, as in the notorious high school “victory lap”), you have demonstrated the capacity for hard, intellectually demanding work.
• Reading (a lot) is key. This was part of the “curiosity test” and is, we think, vitally important. An amazing number of young adults do not read newspapers, magazines, non-fiction books, high-quality literature, or serious blogs or Internet-based commentary. Fewer than one-quarter of all university students in the United States read as much as a single book per year above specific course requirements. We find this sad and depressing. Canadian students are much the same. Literate young people are engaged and often well informed. The best university students read a lot. If you do not read on a regular basis, the chances that you will find university interesting are quite small. Note, by the way, that reading is strongly correlated with writing ability. Good readers are typically strong writers. Read. Read some more. Then keep reading. We have a longer section on this later.
University Readiness
Checklist
• I am naturally curious
• I have strong grades (above 80 percent, and 90 percent for elite university programs)
• I write well and I enjoy writing
• I am good at math
• I am a reader
• I am self-motivated
If you are six for six, you will likely have your choice of universities and your pick of many top programs. But if you miss on one or more of these items, take a long, hard look at yourself. Are you really ready for success at university?
• Self-motivation is essential. Students who rely on parents and teachers to get their work done are at risk in university. After high school, students are pretty much on their own — and some find this difficult to deal with. Professors do not often check to see if you attend classes or nag you to get your assignments done on time. If you count on your parents to get you up for school and meet your deadlines, and if you depend on teachers to make sure you stay on course in your studies, you don’t have the work habits you need for university studies. This is not — by the way — a skill set that you can really wait until after high school to develop in full. Top athletes push their coaches as much as the other way around. Accomplished musicians do not need to be reminded to practise. The best students approach their studies with the same energy and commitment.
Have You Planned Properly?
You are about to make one of the most important decisions of your life. How much time have you devoted to this decision? Canadians are pretty easy-going about their choice of university — probably because, in contrast to the American situation, the universities are easy to get into if you have halfway decent high school grades. Indeed, most young people just sort of fall into both the choice to attend university and the selection of the institution (typically it is the one closest to home). Families in other countries make this into a decade-long saving and planning enterprise.
Check out what happens in other countries. Wealthy American families spend tens of thousands of dollars on college coaches, test-writing seminars, campus visits, and the like. The struggle to get into the elite institutions is a national obsession. In China, in the battle to get into the best universities (Nanjing University accepts only one of every thousand applicants), children study relentlessly for their last two years of high school in order to make top grades. Hundreds of thousands of families around the world save for years so that one or more of their children can attend a well-regarded foreign institution — like the ones that you have available to you for surprisingly little effort.
What is the Canadian equivalent to all of this angst and worry? You fill in an online form, type in your parents’ credit card number, and wait for the letter(s) of offer, with a fairly high level of confidence that all will work out well. But will it all work out? Will you make the right decision to go, or not to? And if you go, will you go to the right place and choose the right program? It’s easy enough to get in to a Canadian university, true enough, but getting in is only a first minor step that does not guarantee you the life you may be looking for.
Here are eight major steps that you should take to prepare properly to make the right choices:
• Keep your options open in high school. Teenagers often make rash decisions in high school: dropping academic math for an extra computer class, avoiding language courses, and worrying as much about protecting spares as the content of the courses they take. Do not take the easy road. Remember that university, if you go, will be much harder and more demanding than high school. Take a full course load, take demanding and high-quality courses, and make sure that you do not close off your academic options. For example, if you do not complete the right grade twelve math courses, you could find yourself denied access to many of the most attractive programs on many university and college campuses.
• Establish a history of work. Quite surprisingly, at least 25 percent of all of the students who enroll in the University of Waterloo’s co-operative education program arrive at university without work experience. Nowadays there is no substitute for experience. It is vital that you work during the latter stages of high school and that you find jobs that have some relationship to the kind of future that you envisage. If you are interested in becoming an entrepreneur, look into starting a summer business. If you are keen about working in construction, get a job as a handyperson’s helper. Whatever you choose to do — get a job, do it well, demonstrate that you are a hard and effective worker, and earn a positive recommendation.
• Volunteer. While some cynical students look at volunteer work as a way of building a résumé — helpful if you expect to be competitive for law or medical school — there are many great reasons for all young adults to volunteer. First, establishing a pattern of giving and helping is good for the soul — it both builds and reflects your character. Second, volunteer activities provide leadership opportunities and can give you excellent practice in a variety of semi-professional areas. Opt for something that involves organizational responsibilities or technical work, like being a treasurer for a school club. These kinds of commitments reveal a great deal about your personality and your general abilities.
• Explore the world of work. It is always astonishing to talk to young adults who have decided to prepare for a career that they know only in the abstract. Learn as much as you can about the fields of endeavour you are considering. Attend career days. Go to job fairs. Check the websites for Human Resources Development Canada, or the trade unions, or workopolis.com and monster.ca. Job shadow as often as you can (your parents’ friends, community members, and neighbours often provide great opportunities). If you are interested in the law, sit in the public section of a courtroom and watch the law in action (be prepared to be bored; it’s not like TV). The best teachers are often those who volunteer in elementary school classes while still in high school. They at least know what they are getting into. Many professional associations or trade unions are keen to help young people learn about opportunities in their fields. Remember, as you go about this process, that eliminating options — you thought you might be a teacher, but then you decide that dealing with thirty adolescents in a class is an unattractive proposition — is as important as identifying precisely what you do want to do.
• Be wise about money. Universities and colleges in Canada, contrary to public belief, are not a huge drain on your resources — unless you are from a low-income family, at which point they can be prohibitively expensive. Unfortunately, students and families are often ill-informed about what the actual costs are. Tuition costs are only part of the total expense, particularly if the student is living away from home. Attending university means making significant sacrifices in standard of living. You are at university to study and improve yourself, and you cannot and should not live as though you are fully employed (i.e., no fancy car unless your parents are wealthy and indulgent). Smart young people heading to university have given careful thought to the sources of funding (parents, employment, government loans and grants, scholarships and bursaries) and the real expenses associated with going to school. Spend a lot of time planning your budget and considering the alternatives. And if you decide not to go to university, the time and effort spent on budgeting will stand you in good stead as you make the transition to the workforce.
• Pay attention to the world around you. Watch what is happening in our country’s trading relations with China. Keep tabs on the progress of the American economy. See what is happening with the resource sector in western Canada. Keep a critical eye on what people say about the future. These are not just news items of interest to your parents. They will define your future prospects and opportunities. There are patterns amidst all of the noise and debates, and you have to find the part of the broader picture that works for you.
• Explore alternatives. Plan to devote a substantial amount of time over your last two years of high school to considering all of the options, many of which are described in this book. Consider colleges, universities, apprenticeships, the world of work, and the other alternatives that we describe. This is your life. Take charge of it.
• Do a full accounting of the entire cost of the choices that you are considering. First, be understanding of your parents. If they are footing the bill for your advanced education (for many Canadian students, grandparents are putting in money as well), they are making major sacrifices. Be respectful of their sacrifices and commitment to you. It might help explain why they believe that have a major stake in your decision. Second, make sure you include lost income in your financial planning. If you headed into the workforce right after high school, you would likely get only an entry-level job, perhaps in a coffee shop or grocery store. At the Canadian minimum wage (assume it is $10 an hour), you would earn about $20,000 a year. If you take five years to complete a degree, you will have lost $100,000 in income. So, the degree, at $15,000 a year in direct expenses, is actually going to cost you (or someone) a total of $175,000, minus whatever you earn in part-time and summer work. If you spend this money on your education and end up selling coffee or stocking shelves anyway, you will have made a major investment in your education for a very small financial return.
To us, this advice seems pretty obvious, and we know from our experience with the thousands of young adults we have known over the years that it works. It is easy to differentiate between young people with real potential and the ones marking time as they work their way through their courses and programs. Here is the key point: in the not-so-distant past, the simple fact that someone had a university degree answered an employer’s most important questions about an application. In 1960, having a degree generally meant that you were intelligent, motivated, endowed with good work habits, reliable and dependable, innately curious, and well organized.
But now the university entrance gates have swung almost completely open — just see how many of your high school friends (some of whom, you will agree, were hardly stellar in class) are going to university. As the universities have accepted a much broader range of students, the ability of an employer to assume that a degree represented all of these personal qualities has diminished. A university degree still means something: it does require persistence, a certain level of skill and — depending on the field — good deal of ability. But it might not mean this, and that is why you need much more in your résumé if you expect to get noticed.
If you’ve decided at this point that university is for you, we want to prepare you the best way we know how to make it a huge success. Remember, if you want the career you are hoping for, you must be able to stand apart from the swarm. The time to prepare for this success is now — well, actually, the time to start was several years ago, but now is still better than never.
How Can You Get (or Sharpen) these Essential Skills?
It would be nice if everything we said could be upbeat, and if we could tell you nothing but sweet things: you are the greatest generation that ever lived, your education so far has been first-rate, you are fully equipped for university, where you will succeed and make your parents proud. University won’t be too difficult, because you were an A student in high school, with an 80 percent average, and so on and so on. But we won’t lie to you: all of this may be true, or some of it, or none of it. Only you can judge (until, of course, your university judges you).
There are, though, two things that are essential to your success in university. They also will significantly improve your chances for success in whatever you do in your life.
Learn to Write
Let’s start with the conclusion to this part: there is nothing — not anything — more fundamental to success in an English-speaking university than the ability to write English prose. This is true in the sciences as well in the humanities. It’s probably less true if you are aiming for a degree in physical education (more important there to have athletic ability, but you will still be surprised), but it’s vital everywhere else. Allied with this is the ability to read fluently and critically. Yes, of course you can read and write. We aren’t suggesting that you are illiterate. But can you read and write at a university level? A dismaying number of university students can’t — a fact that illuminates one of the great failures of our contemporary primary and secondary education system.
On the subject of writing, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that, given practice, anyone can learn to write in a manner that will be acceptable to those who grade undergraduate essays and research papers in the various disciplines. There are a number of different styles used at university: papers written for the humanities and social sciences are not the same as those written for the physical sciences, where “scientific writing” is required. But it can all be learned, if you want to learn it. Be warned, however, that universities do not want the compositions that you wrote in high school. They do not care how you spent your summer vacation, nor are they interested in what a colourful character your grandfather was. They want evidence of research and analysis, clearly and correctly put forward in prose.
We assume here that you really want to learn to write, that you are going to take writing seriously, and not just scrape through with C- grades along with the swarm, or — heaven forbid — buy your essays from some criminal Internet source. (Shame on those who do this — universities and other institutions have clever ways in which to catch them, and they deserve the heavy penalties that await them if caught.)
Before we tell you how to learn to write, we should explain why correct writing is necessary. You may have experienced some fussy teacher, a stuffy pedant who tells you silly stuff such as the “rule” that you should never end a sentence with a preposition. Someone once said that to Winston Churchill, who replied “this is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.” (If you don’t know what a preposition is, then you have a point at which to start learning.) That’s not what we mean, and it’s not even, contrary to what English teachers will tell you, that you have to write well to make your meaning clear. Of course you do, but you’d have to be pretty awful to write in a way such that a reader couldn’t tell what you were talking about, though we have read some student papers of this kind.
The harsh fact is that the way you write is a marker of your education and, to some extent, of your class background — much as Canadians like to pretend that social class does not exist in this country. Example: if you write I don’t know nothing about it, English teachers will recoil in horror (we will too), though your meaning is perfectly clear (pedants will say that I don’t know nothing means that you do know something, but that’s just pedantry). The reason that it’s wrong to say this is a social one: it makes you sound uneducated. Do you want to sound like a doofus when you submit a university paper, apply for a job, or write a letter or an email during the course of your employment? Do you want people to roll their eyes when they read your writing? Surely not, and that’s why you want to write correctly. The rules of correct English writing are not carved in stone, and they do change over time: they are simply the usages that educated people and good writers have decided upon, and though the preposition thing is not one of them, the rule against double negatives is.
How, then, do you learn to write? It’s simple, but not necessarily easy, and here is the bad news we mentioned above. The best way to learn to write is not to study the rules of English grammar — the difference between and principal and a subordinate clause, and all the others. You will want to do this, but later on. Here’s the secret: to learn to write, you have to internalize the structure and rhythms of the written English language, and the best and probably the only way to do this is to read. Read, and read, and read, and read. Read good fiction, good non-fiction, read as much as you can, read a book or two a week, not drivel like zombie novels written for adolescents, but fiction by masters of English from past years such as Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, or, to pick modern Canadian examples, Tom King, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, or Alice Munro (a wonderful writer of short stories who just won the Nobel Prize for literature). Have you ever read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The Grapes of Wrath, or The Handmaid’s Tale? Were they assigned high school reading? If so, you probably viewed them as a chore. But read them again, carefully, and see how the sentences and paragraphs are constructed. Listen to the rhythm of the words. You are not going to write like these people, and neither are we — nor would we want to. But they are masters of English prose, and you can learn from them. Don’t try to learn from the writers of earlier generations. You want to write in a modern fashion, not like Charles Dickens. Read twentieth- and twenty-first-century stuff.
Read good non-fiction. There’s so much of it that it’s hard to know what to recommend, but after a while you will recognize it. As the U.S. Supreme Court justice said about pornography, you will find it hard to define, but you will know it when you see it. Ask someone you respect to recommend some reading in a field that interests you. Read a book a week, two books a week, and eventually you will internalize what good English sounds like. Once you know that, you will be able to write. After that you can learn the rules of grammar. It’s appalling that many high schools no longer teach them, but that’s another story.
And then you should write. You will of course write all your high school assignments, but some schools don’t give very many, and some go in for the composition type of thing that doesn’t do you any good at university. Why not write for the school yearbook or, even better, become the school correspondent for your local newspaper? Write wherever you can: news in the bulletin of your temple, church, or mosque, something about your hockey team for the newspaper. Write letters to your elderly relatives who don’t use the computer. Have someone whose literacy skills you trust look over your writing and comment on it. Yes, all this is work, but you want to stand out from the swarm, don’t you?
How long will it take to learn to write? Well, a good time to start is as early as possible, as soon as you actually learn to read. Six years old is about right. Most great writers were voracious readers from their youth. But it’s never too late, and if you start now and read and write consistently, you can become a decent writer, turning out essays and research papers that, if not Hemingway-esque, will at least not embarrass you.
We say again: there is nothing, not anything, more fundamental to success in university than the ability to write English prose. Start a serious program of reading now or, even better, yesterday. You say you don’t like to read? Ah, well then…..
Study Math — and Learn to Like It
Or at least study it. When we told you we were going to give you friendly and helpful advice, this didn’t imply that it was advice you necessarily would welcome. Here it is: if you want a chance at the fullest range of careers after graduation, you must study mathematics at university, and this means taking serious math in high school, not the watered-down courses. We can hear the protests and howls of rage already. Canadian students, raised in an era of celebration of individual choice and encouragement of easy pathways to success, have learned to fear and hate mathematics. We will admit that high school math is often poorly taught — for lack of properly qualified teachers, more than one high school has assigned a physical education or English teacher to teach a math course. Nevertheless, math is one of the most important and foundational subjects in high school. If you intend to go to university and if you want a full chance at a wide range of careers, you must study academic math in high school. What is more, if you want a real shot at twenty-first-century success, you had better be reasonably good at it.
Let’s start with the hardest sell, that math is intellectually challenging and fun. Properly taught, high school math is full of riddles, puzzles, creative formulas, and, most importantly, problem solving. Math teaches mental agility, builds a life-long facility with numbers, and provides a foundation for advanced study in other academic subjects. It is not easy — but neither is English for those who don’t have a natural aptitude for it — and it is a program of study that is truly incremental: what you learn in elementary school is essential for high school, which in turn is a requirement for success at university. You have to study math, stick with it, internalize its intellectual dynamics, and learn to apply its thought processes if not its formulas in many other aspects of your life.
Many Canadian students are at a severe disadvantage compared to those of other nations (although, surprisingly, our performance on international tests suggests that, as a group, Canadian young people do reasonably well — tenth out of seventy countries in 2009, down from seventh three years earlier).[2] In East Asia (where attention to mathematics is an obsession) and in Eastern Europe, there is a deep commitment to the fundamentals of mathematics. All students study math throughout their school years. They learn by rote and they work in very competitive environments, their parents working as hard to push them on as most Canadian parents spend convincing their children they are all above average. By rote we mean, for instance, that they memorize the multiplication tables, something that many Canadian schools abandoned in favour of getting students to “understand” what eight times seven is.
The result of all this is that Canadian students, as a rule, develop a strong aversion to mathematics. Even Barbie got into the act. A few years back, one of the talking Barbies was programmed to say “I hate math,” generating widespread anger among feminists for stereotyping young girls as being anti-math. Actually, boys hate it just as much. High school students and university students alike talk about math courses as the academic equivalent of a colonoscopy (if you don’t know what a colonoscopy is, look it up, and be glad you are still young). Some persist, particularly the science-oriented, because they are told that studying math is good for them or because it’s a program requirement. But the majority of the students opt out. Only a minority of high school graduates have taken advanced high school math — advanced meaning the kind that all collegiate graduates took two generations ago. Many of those who take it do so more than once, struggling to get the math scores that they need to get into the most competitive programs.
This leads to the practical reason for tackling mathematics. Students who do not complete the right high school courses and who do not succeed at first-year university math will find more than half of all the programs on campus closed to them. Some of the most popular academic and professional fields — engineering, applied science, finance, accounting, economics, computer science, environmental modelling — require a high level of fluency in and comfort with math. In other areas, math is included as a barrier and test, a program requirement that does a fine job of weeding out the weak and unmotivated from the hard-working and determined. Check the program requirements across campus at the university closest to you and see what programs require high school and university math.
Equally important, those programs with high math requirements are also the programs with the greatest career opportunities and the best income levels for graduates. Without math you could be denying yourself access to some neat and interesting programs. Career-wise, you will be blocking access to the best-paying and highest-demand jobs in the modern economy. The message is simple. Study math. Work hard in high school and try to enjoy it, and if you can’t enjoy it, work hard anyway. If you can’t warm to it, then study it because it is essential to your future and will determine your options in university and, very likely, in the workforce. If you say “but I hate it,” we won’t say “suck it up,” but that’s what we are thinking….
How else should You Prepare?
Beyond the two major things (learning to write and studying math), the things that you need to do to succeed in university — or wherever else you may go — are largely evident through common sense and open dialogue with parents, teachers, and people working in whatever job appeals to you. Nevertheless, we’ll note the following pieces of advice:
• If you’re going to university, you should take the high school courses that prepare you for post-secondary education. Take the serious math courses, not the easy ones designed to make sure that every eighteen-year-old, no matter how unskilled, has a high school diploma. Take the serious English courses, the ones where you have to read Shakespeare (please tell us that your school offers them), not the so-called “applied” ones with names like “Contemporary English” or “Communications.” It’s true that there are some universities in Canada that will accept any grade twelve course for admission, but you don’t want to go that route.
• Construct a résumé that will indicate what a stellar person you are, as well as giving you as much practical experience as possible. Do what interests you: coach a young kids’ soccer team, be a camp counsellor in the summer, teach Sunday School, win a prize at the Science Fair, or learn to play the bassoon. Don’t just loaf around texting your friends and following Justin Bieber on Twitter.
Everything positive you do adds up, and when you are applying for a university program that’s hard to get into, your impressive résumé will be a big help. Good luck.