In my first year of teaching, I had a student in my engineering class who was clearly miserable. Smart, hardworking, showed up every day — but completely lost. One afternoon he told me: "Sir, I took engineering because my uncle is a successful engineer. I thought it would work for me too."
That was my first year. Over the next decade, I had variations of that same conversation hundreds of times. Different students, different relatives, different fields — but the same root cause. A career chosen based on someone else's success, with no consideration of the student's own strengths.
The saddest part is that these students are not lazy or unintelligent. They are simply never given a structured way to understand themselves before making one of the most consequential decisions of their life.