- The process of making a career choice is the first significant confrontation with the sense of aging, involving as it does the knowledge or belief that such a decision is fateful because it determines how the rest of one's life will be "filled in." It is a "moment of truth" kind of problem which makes for varying degrees of vacillation, postponement, and anxiety because the choice involves numerous factors: strength of interests, familial relationships and pressures, economic factors (personal and national), love and peer relationships, time perspective, and how one reads and structures the future. The need for independence and autonomy comes face-to-face with societal pressure to conform, not the least of which is that one feels one has to make a decision at a particular point in time. One can no longer sample from the smorgasbord of opportunity; one must choose and live with the choice. There are, of course, individuals, probably small in number, who long have known what they were going to do; they are viewed by some with envy, by others with derision, and by still others with an effete attitude that seems to be saying "anyone who willingly and joyously enters this real world with the expectation of happiness has postponed his moment of truth." However one conceptualizes the process of career choice, one cannot ignore that at this particular time in our society the process is for many suffused with dysphoric anticipations about what may be symbolically called dying. It is not only a matter of "am I making the right or wrong choice" but, for many, "will society allow me to be the kind of person I want to be, regardless of choice?" The locus of control is perceived as external rather than internal. This has probably been the case for past decades, but it was accompanied by the belief that by striving, diligence, and maneuvering one could lick the odds. This accompaniment is much less in evidence today.
- Since World War II, and in no small measure because of it, the number of new fields and career possibilities has escalated. Just as during this same period it has become possible to easily travel and vacation any place on this earth, a young person today is aware of a much greater array of career possibilities than was true in his parents' generation. Both within and among fields the choices are many. Students are aware of this as they are of the stubborn fact that they must make a choice. They are also aware that at the same time that society tells them that there are numerous directions available to them, the educational system (beginning in high school) is organized increasingly to pressure the student to narrow his choices. In college they must choose a major, and in graduate and professional school they are also forced to declare their choice. For example, a student does not apply to graduate school because he is interested in the field of psychology but rather because he has been required, formally or informally, to declare his special interest, e.g., clinical, physiological, social, personality, child, cognitive, industrial, educational and learning. Theoretically the options are many; in practice they are few. The discrepancy, for some students, arouses a strange mixture of sense of loss, the need to justify choice by eliminating dissonance, and a passive acceptance of fate's workings. For others the discrepancy is far less of a problem. By the time a student of either type has been in graduate or professional school for a year or more he already knows how narrow his horizons have become. This is especially true for that ever-increasing number of students who choose medicine or law because each of these fields was perceived as containing many more career options than other fields.
- For many reasons, chiefly demographic and economic, our society will increasingly contain individuals who will go through life knowing that they never were able to enter the career of their first choice. There has always been a discrepancy between the number of graduate and professional school applications and openings. In recent years this discrepancy has become nothing short of scandalous. Not having the opportunity to enter the career of first choice need not be a tragedy, and undoubtedly there are some individuals who enter other careers that give them satisfactions. But for many the disappointment will be a festering irritant interacting with later frustrations to cloud present and future with the deprivations of the past. To go through life knowing that one's work is one's second or third choice must affect one's sense of the passage of time, how one justifies existence and looks to an ever-shortening future. The sense of worth has diverse sources, but few are as potent as how one regards one's work. It could be argued that the market place of life finds ways of compensating for disappointments; that is, an unsatisfied demand will be made up for by some substitute supply of compensation. But markets, economic and psychological, break down, sometimes with convulsive consequences. When we consider that our society will have an increasing number of educated people as well as an increasing number who will not have been "allowed" to pursue a primary interest, it is difficult to adopt an indifferent or positive stance. Rising expectations together with rising frustrations have a revolutionary potential which, when and if it becomes manifest, can take a retrograde rather than a progressive form.
- There has been an increase in the number of people who seek a career change, be that change within or between fields of work. There are no data on the frequency of such changes, but our observations, interviews, and some exploratory studies lead us to the conclusion that it is far from an infrequent phenomenon. The dynamics powering such changes are complicated and varied. The sought-for change can take place at any time after one has begun a career. Indeed, it is our impression that whereas it used to be a "midcareer crisis," it now can occur much earlier. Several factors have contributed to both the increased frequency and earlier timing of career changes. One of these factors is the emphasis placed on the social worth of one's work. It has always been the case that professionals were expected to experience their work as personally satisfying, its social worthiness being taken for granted. It is precisely the social worth of much professional work that has been called into question in recent years. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the generalized consequences of the turbulent sixties, the turmoil surrounding the Vietnam war-this train of events instigated in many professionals profound questioning about the significance of their work. If the questioning was not strong enough to produce wholesale career changes, it nevertheless placed the significance of work high on the social agenda. When individuals no longer believe in the inevitability of progress, when they see themselves and their work as perhaps contributing to the moral confusion, it is small wonder that some will seek to make radical changes in their work and life style. Another factor, no less important than the first, is that recent generations have expected more from their work, that is, that their work will and should always be challenging and novelty producing. That is to say, work should be intrinsically stimulating and productive of "self-actualization" or "personal growth." And can anyone doubt that the past few decades has seen a fantastic rise in the number of people who spend their time helping others to "grow," to recognize their "true selves," to be unafraid of change and novelty, and "to do their thing"? Ours is a time of conflicting and even contradictory tendencies: a new form of rugged individualism and a heightened sense of social responsibility. It was inevitable that these tendencies would have repercussions in the world of work in the form of an increase in career changes. The dynamics and their consequences are similar to those with respect to marriage and divorce. On the level of rhetoric, at least, it used to be that when one got married it was supposed to be forever, a view of the future supported by religion and law. And if one did not believe that marriages were made in heaven, there was no doubt that they could not easily be undone on earth. One was expected to make the best of the marriage. One life, one marriage partner. That, of course, has changed as it is changing in the world of work. It is true that our society has made it far easier to change marriage partners than to change careers, but that difference may well be in the process of being eroded. What is involved here is not only a changing set of attitudes toward work but to the experience of the passage of time in which dying and "imprisonment" are symbolically or literally somewhere in the background. To see one's self as remaining "unfulfilled" or "bored" or "locked in" in what is perceived as a world of endless possibilities in a finite, shortening life raises the conflict between activity and passivity to a very heightened level, higher, we think, than it has ever been before in our society.
The four statements have given and will give direction to a variety of initial studies on the process and phenomenology of career choice among college students: changes in attitudes toward the career and the future that take place in the course of graduate and professional education, the timing and frequency of career changes, and the ever developing awareness of the sense of the passage of time and its merging into the sense of aging. We do not doubt that our studies will cause us to change our conceptions in certain respects. Our initial data, however, confirm what we suspected in two very important respects. First, the years devoted to professional education are experienced as an ever-narrowing of horizons and options in which personal choice and style are compromised by the need to conform to externally set criteria of "success." For example, when one interviews students headed for law, medical, or graduate school, they have two major expectations: Either they see themselves as having boundless opportunities to absorb new knowledge and experience which will subsequently open all sorts of career possibilities to them in the near and distant future, or they recognize that there will or may be a conflict between what they hope and what they will be required to do, but somehow their internal compass for maintaining integrity will protect them (a sub-segment of this group are those who truly view professional education with foreboding and no compass). When one interviews students near the end of their professional training, one is struck by their feeling that they have been "molded," have been forced to become "realistic," and that the options they once expected to be available to them have been reduced drastically. There is in many of them a quiet desperation, a knowledge that the status, capabilities, and satisfactions that society projects onto them, far from being balm, create in them a guilty unease. And when we find, as we have, that at least 20 per cent of a sample of physicians explicitly express dissatisfaction with their careers, the forebodings of our younger interviewees cannot be viewed as without some merit.
