Being a junior in high school doing the Running Start program, people often ask me what I want to be when I grow up.

I will generally respond with engineer or something similar, and everyone will give me stories about engineers they know or tell me that it is a good field to pursue. I never specify what field of engineering I want to go into or where I want to specifically work as an engineer. I simply leave it as is.

Why? The answer is simply this: I don’t know what I want to be.

Saying that I want to be an engineer isn’t really lying; it also isn’t telling the whole truth. In saying I want to be an engineer, I could be saying I want to be a computer technical engineer or a waste management engineer. Without being specific, I avoid saying “I am not sure yet.” A comment like that will result in a lecture about how important it is to decide what you want to be.

I still have a year and two thirds left of school before I have to decide what college I go to and what I want to major in. I don’t want to rush into a decision and wake up one morning at age 35 and realize I hate what I do. Going through all of the schooling and work to become whatever I was pressured into becoming, then realizing it is not what I want to do, would be, to put it simply, not good. I want to make sure that before I decide what I want to be that I am sure that it is what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I suggest you do the same. There are so many different things I like doing right now, there is no way to pick a favorite.

However, I think the only thing worse than pressuring someone my age into picking a profession is when an adult or recent graduate tells you to enjoy high school because it’s the best time of your life. That’s like telling us that we have nothing to look forward to — that after high school, life is boring. It’s a rather depressing thing to be told. If there is, in fact, nothing to look forward to after high school, why do we bother working hard to get good grades when we are just wasting the best time of our lives working on the boring stuff that comes afterward?

I disagree high school is the best time of our lives. Adults need to stop telling us that. If we work hard, get good grades and graduate from college, then with a little bit of luck and a good career I think that our entire lives can be just as good if not better than high school. If you work hard and don’t dig yourself into debt, the future can be just as good as the past.

— Kyler Lacey is a junior at Kingston High School participating in the Running Start program at Olympic College.