What to do when your teen can’t choose between psychology, linguistics, law or physical therapy
Last Tuesday, I was scraping hardened pepperoni grease off the kitchen table after taco night, when my 17-year-old daughter Lila dumped her backpack on the chair and slid four crumpled notebook pages across the table. Each had one word scrawled in blue highlighter at the top: Psychology. Linguistics. Law. Physical Therapy. “I crossed off everything else,” she said, twisting the end of her ponytail. “I can’t cut any more. What do you think I should pick?”
Soccer cleats from after-school practice were propped by the back door, and her iced tea was sweating through the paper cup onto the linoleum. I’d seen this coming for weeks. She’d been flipping through college major guides for months, ranting every time her guidance counselor asked her to narrow her list down. My first instinct was to rattle off the pros I’d seen scrolling parent forums at 10 p.m. Law pays well, if you get into a good school. Physical therapy is always in demand, you’ll never be out of work. Psychology sounds good but you need a master’s to do anything with it. Linguistics? I barely even knew what people did with a linguistics degree.
I bit that back. I remembered being 17, wanting to study journalism, and my own mom telling me it was too unstable, so I picked business and hated every minute of it for three years before I worked up the courage to switch. I didn’t want to do that to her. Instead, I suggested we test the options. We had two weeks of spring break coming up, I said, why not do one half-day session with each, no commitment, just see what it feels like to be in that space every day?
First up was physical therapy. Our next-door neighbor is a PT at a small outpatient clinic downtown, and she agreed to let Lila tag along for an afternoon. Lila came home with sore feet—she’d been on her feet the whole time, helping move patients between tables and wheelchairs, walking with them through stretching routines—and a quiet smile. She said at the end of the day, a 72-year-old man who’d had a hip replacement walked 10 steps without his walker, and he hugged everyone on the staff. That felt better than winning a state debate tournament, she said, which is the biggest high she usually talks about.
Next was linguistics. We emailed the department at the local state university, and a grad student let her sit in on an intro lecture. They talked about how Gen Z slang shifts meaning faster than dictionaries can update, and how social media is blurring old regional accent lines. Lila thought that was cool, but when she came home, she admitted most of the lecture focused on research studies mapping vowel shifts, and she didn’t care that much about writing papers on it. She just likes noticing how people talk when we go on road trips, she said. That doesn’t need to be her whole job.
Then psychology. She sat in with our high school’s youth counselor, observing an after-school group session for kids dealing with test anxiety. She came home, ate three chocolate chip cookies straight from the jar, and didn’t say a word for almost an hour. By the end of the afternoon, she said, she felt like she was carrying all of the kids’ stress with her. She still likes listening to podcasts about why people act the way they do, and helping her friends work through fights with their parents, but she didn’t know if she could hold that weight every single day.
Last was law. My cousin works as a public defender at the local courthouse, and she let Lila tag along for a morning of pretrial hearings. Lila said most of the day wasn’t the dramatic closing arguments she sees on TV—it was waiting around, filling out forms, and sorting through paperwork. She liked spotting inconsistencies in witness statements, and talking to clients about their side of the story, but all the repetitive paperwork made her want to fall asleep at her desk.
This process taught me something I hadn’t thought about before, when I was stressing over her choice. Most of the advice online tells you to lead with salary and job growth, but that skips the most important question: can you stand the boring, unglamorous parts of the job every day? Every field has them, and testing that in person is way more useful than any career quiz. Another concrete thing that worked for us: we talked about job prospects and pay after she tried each field, not before. If we’d led with the numbers, we would have crossed linguistics off first, and missed that it makes a perfect minor for her to study just for fun.
Right now, Lila is leaning toward a physical therapy major with a linguistics minor, but she changes her mind every other week. We’re only applying to schools that let her declare her major sophomore year, so she can take intro classes for both of her top options first semester if she still can’t decide. She still talks about maybe going to law school in 10 years, or switching to psychology if she changes her mind later, and I don’t panic when she says that.
This isn’t a choice that locks her into one path forever, and I’ve stopped treating it like it has to be perfect. We still hash it out over taco night every week, and I just pass her the extra salsa when she’s done talking. We’ve got time.
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