receiving advice on shaping your life
College is a critical period in one's life. During this period of plasticity and exploration, a good mentor can change one's life.
But of course good mentors are hard to come by, especially at universities.
Academicians are obsessed with political correctness and cultural relativism. Moreover they generally view university as a playground for conducting their research rather than as a platform for imparting big picture wisdom to students and actively helping them shape their lives. They neither have the time nor the desire to get to know you at a level where they can feel comfortable supplying customized non-generic advices. Therefore, you will be hard pressed to find anybody who has the guts to tell you which career path you should choose, especially in individualistic countries like United States. At best, you will receive some relevant information and then be left alone to decide what you want to do.
The office of career services (that methodology-driven, hygienic place whose mere existence formally relieves academicians of all the moral obligations associated with shaping others' lives) fails as well, due the simple reason that it is not easy to influence someone, even if he / she is young and hungry for advice. To influence someone is a deeply psychological and formula resistant process. As the receiver, you need to have a good dose of respect, trust and admiration for the other side. Only then you will turn off your rationalistic defenses, open up and move deeper down to an emotional level. Instrumentally speaking, there is really no difference between shaping a single person's life and moving entire masses, and obviously career services (and similarly human resources) departments can not move masses.
Real education inevitably has a slightly despotic character. To deny this is basically equivalent to equating information and wisdom. Young people - by definition - mistake the forest for the trees. No matter how much information you can dump on them in four years, they will still be more or less in the same exact condition upon graduation. Gaining wisdom without going through the hard way of building years of experience is a deeply vulnerable process. It involves opening up to the other side and gulping a distilled solution whose contents look currently opaque. Of course, you can always choose the hard way, dive in, make mistakes and try to learn from them. (Never fall under the illusion that you are building yourself from scratch. We all operate on a gigantic tapestry of background wisdom, called culture.) That is basically how one grows up. But making avoidable mistakes is just plain dumb and results in unnecessary loss of time.
Due to the vulnerability of the process, you should be very careful about who you are opening up to.
Beware those who are too eager to impart their knowledge and shape your life. They will, even if they have good intentions, often fuck up the mentoring process by moving too fast and skipping on getting to really know you and building the necessary trust base.
Beware those who fail to grasp the basic open-ended nature of future. This is especially true if you have the option of operating at a cutting edge. Academicians (in their ivory towers) can be severely out of touch with the reality of an ever evolving economic landscape. Always keep in mind that most of the currently available jobs were literally non-existent a century ago and the speed of change is accelerating. (For instance, one of my biggest passions turned out to be user experience design which is a very young field that did not even exist while I was in college.)
All of what I said above applies only to normal people. The upper (and also lower) ends of talent distributions have special needs.
Extraordinary talent basically comes in two types: Those who define a new genre and those who defy all genres. They are respectively the great explorers and generalists of culture, moving humanity forward along with them. To an explorer, a career advice can sound like an insult, since that person is literally creating a new field for himself / herself. To a generalist, a career advice can feel like a prison, unnecessarily boxing that person into a singularity while he / she is capable of running several threads at eighty percent mastery level, meanwhile facilitating new explorations by opening up new channels of communication.
In my opinion, such people should only be provided content-free motivational coaching and a psychological / physical safety zone. That is all. (On a similar topic, read taming geniuses.)
