Should My Child Study Psychology, Linguistics, Law or Physical Therapy? What I’ve Learned
The iced tea I poured an hour earlier had a ring of condensation on our kitchen counter, and my 17-year-old senior Lila was picking at a cold pepperoni pizza crust while staring at her open laptop. The screen was full of half-scrolled college major pages, and a crumpled worksheet with pros and cons crossed out multiple times in blue pen sat to the left of her plate. “I’ve narrowed it down to these four,” she said, without looking up. “Psychology, linguistics, law or physical therapy. Which one should I pick?”
I leaned against the fridge, about to say the first thing that popped into my head—follow your passion, whatever makes you happy—when I stopped. Last month, we’d gone to my cousin’s college graduation, where she’d told us she was working part-time at a coffee shop six months after getting her psychology bachelor’s, because she couldn’t afford grad school and couldn’t find a full-time entry-level job in her field. I’d also heard Lila complain for weeks about how her friend’s older sibling was miserable in law school, drowning in debt and hating every day of it. Generic advice wasn’t going to cut it here.
Lila had reasons for each option, all rooted in things she’d actually done, not just TikTok trends. She’d volunteered 10 hours a week at the local outpatient physical therapy clinic for a year, helping check in patients and assist with warm-up exercises. She’d started a small after-school reading group for middle schoolers with language delays, after our neighbor’s non-verbal son joined our neighborhood book swap and she wanted to make something that fit his needs. That’s where linguistics caught her eye. She’d spent spring break canvassing for tenant rights in our city, and loved the back-and-forth negotiating she got to do with city staff, which made her curious about law. And she’d spent countless nights listening to teen mental health podcasts, and helped her best friend through a really ugly breakup last semester that had her thinking about how the mind works—hence psychology.
Instead of giving her an answer, I suggested we test out each option before she applied to college. It didn’t require any big expensive programs or cross-country trips, just small, low-stakes steps that fit into her already busy schedule of classes and soccer practice. First, I helped her draft a short email to one person in each field, asking for 15 minutes to talk about what their day is actually like, and if she could shadow for a half day. I expected most people to say no, but every single one said yes. People love talking about their work to curious kids, most of the time.
Over the next two months, she fit in the shadowing around her other commitments. One Saturday, she spent the whole day at the PT clinic, not just doing aide work but walking through appointments with her preceptor, sitting in on insurance check-ins, and watching how the therapists plan treatments. After that day, she came home and said she loved helping the 10-year-old who got his cast off that morning learn to walk again, but she’d already come home with a sore knee—she’d torn her ACL in soccer two years ago, and standing and bending for eight straight days a week would probably leave her in chronic pain long-term. That was enough to cross PT off her list, no argument needed.
For law, she sat in on three intake sessions with a lawyer who works with tenants at the local non-profit. She saw that most days weren’t dramatic courtroom arguments, like on TV. Most days were filling out forms, waiting for court dates, and dealing with people who are under incredible stress that can’t always be fixed. She told me after, “I like fighting for people, but I don’t want to spend 40 hours a week doing paperwork, and I don’t want to take on three years of law school debt just to do that.” Cross off law.
For linguistics, she spent a few afternoons helping a speech-language pathologist who got her undergrad in linguistics run a summer camp for kids with language disorders. She loved making AAC flashcards and working one-on-one with the kids, but she learned that to do that kind of clinical work, she’d need at least a master’s degree, same as PT or clinical psychology. For psychology, she helped our school counselor run a freshmen study hall and sat in on two student check-ins (with parent permission, of course). She liked that it mixed talking to people and problem solving, but she kept coming back to how much she loved the language work she did with the middle schoolers.
What we ended up with isn’t a perfectly neat answer. Lila’s applying to colleges with a plan to major in psychology, minor in linguistics, and then apply to grad school for speech-language pathology, which uses both degrees. It’s not one of the four original options, exactly, but it grew out of testing each one instead of just picking from a list.
For other parents going through this same question, the biggest thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to have the answer, and your kid doesn’t have to pick from the list they started with. Instead of asking them to pick based on salary or what sounds impressive, help them do three small concrete things: first, ask them to write down what they actually enjoy doing day to day—do they like standing and moving, or sitting at a desk? Do they want to start working after four years of college, or are they okay with extra school? Second, reach out to one person in each field for a quick chat. Most people will say yes, especially if you explain it’s for a high schooler exploring options. Third, get a half day of shadowing in, so they can see the boring, hard parts of the job that college brochures don’t show you.
Lila still talks about switching things up if she doesn’t like her first two years of college, and that’s okay. We didn’t solve every question, but we avoided the mistake of picking something that looks good on paper without actually knowing what it’s like. Right now, that’s enough.
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