Like many other gifted individuals, my greatest challenge was figuring out what my professional direction was going to be. The next greatest challenge was to determine what kind of post graduate education I would pursue. Gifted individuals are likely to be multipotential, meaning they can be successful in numerous areas due to having multiple interests and strengths (Rinn & Bishop, 2015). I had a strong foundation in STEM, and I was attracted to English and even anthropology. In the end I elected to study law, which at the time seemed like a somewhat arbitrary choice, though it did have the potential to combine many disciplines. At least that was the theory, but I wondered how it would actually work out in practice.

A 2006 study conducted by Siekanska and Sekowski in Poland examined the job satisfaction of gifted versus non-gifted adults aged 26 to 35 (2006). They found that gifted adults were more likely to be satisfied with their job than their non-gifted peers though they are more likely to struggle when their work environment is intolerant of their needs (Nauta and Corten, 2002). The researchers noted that there were key factors that led to such satisfaction and, though they are similar to general career advice, there were some notable differences.

Factors, such as finding a job that connects with core interests, work that is a source of pleasure, and having a supportive team atmosphere, are crucial to anyone’s career choice. For gifted individuals, career satisfaction means extra consideration to finding a career where they can take advantage of their special skills and predispositions (Siekanska and Sekowski, 2006). Gifted individuals are more likely to have highly focused interests while completely ignoring other matters, they may exhibit black and white thinking, and may employ what appears to be circuitous reasoning even though they arrive at the same conclusions (Daniels & Piechowski, 2009). They thrive when given the space to utilize these modes of thinking, where they are able to utilize their creative thinking and be “independent in their thinking” (Siekanska and Sekowski, 2006).

As my first semester draws to a close I have never been more confident that I made the right career choice. The moment this awareness came together remains illusive, but things have unquestionably clicked. Sure, the weight of half-day exams rests heavily on my shoulders and switching from MLA to IRAC is challenging, but wherever I turn I find that I love what I am pursuing. The core characteristics of law, research, writing, creative argumentation, and facilitating the work of a team while being able to work solo, directly reflect my core predispositions.

None of this would have been possible if I hadn’t been allowed to explore the many options I encountered and encouraged to self-reflect on my strengths. The average person changes careers five to seven times in their life so it is never too late to reflect on your choices and redirect your life (US Department of Labor).

• Daniels, S., & Piechowski, M. M. (2009). Living with intensity: Emotional development of gifted children, adolescents, and adults. Great Potential Press.
• Nauta, N., & Corten, F. (2002). Gifted adults in work. (K. Jamdagni, Trans.). Tijdschrift voor Bedrijfs- en Verzekeringsgeneeskunde [Journal for Occupational and Insurance Physicians], 10, 332-335.
• Rinn, A. N., & Bishop, J. (2015). Gifted adults. Gifted Child Quarterly, 59(4), 213–235.
• Siekańska, M., & Sękowski, A. (2006). Job satisfaction and temperament structure of gifted people. High Ability Studies, 17, 75-85.

In ninth grade, while studying for midterms and slogging through term papers, I started daydreaming about how I wanted to spend my summer.  Ideally, I wanted to do scientific research, but given my age, I wasn’t sure what types of opportunities were available.  That’s when I learned about , which offers high school students a chance to work with distinguished mentors doing hands-on research in many different fields for three and six-week externships during the summer. I sent in my application to ������Ƶ, interviewed, and to my surprise, I was accepted into this prestigious program.

In the EXPLORE program, I worked as an extern for four days a week onsite with my mentor and research team and then attended career-oriented workshops off-site once a week. During these weekly seminars, industry leaders lead discussions in regards to interviewing skills, resume writing, presentation skills, and applying to college. The program was launched and coordinated with the assistance of ������Ƶ’s Ms. Niña Abonal, who matched up students to mentors as well as helped organize our meetings. Before our externship, we learned about the layout of our worksite and completed any training needed to work safely onsite at the university research labs. The externships were at various locations and college campuses in the Los Angeles area and included opportunities in diverse areas, including the sciences, arts, and humanities.

As an ������Ƶ extern, I enjoyed attending the weekly workshops, and it also gave me the chance to meet other high school externs and to learn about their projects in diverse fields such as computer science, medical research, and the arts. For my externship, I worked with Dr. Van Savage and his research team at UCLA for three weeks to develop mathematical computer-based models of vascular networks. This externship gave me the opportunity to assist with ongoing research that will lead to improved diagnosis of abnormalities such as cancers and circulatory diseases, which are leading causes of human suffering, illness, and death. Currently, the standard way for doctors to detect and identify these types of abnormalities is visually, which is not always accurate or reliable. I relished the opportunity to develop a computer model based on mathematical principles. What made the project particularly unique for me was combining the computer model with MRI data from living organisms to detect vascular abnormalities far sooner than is currently available.

It amazes me that mentors such as Dr. Savage volunteer to work with high school students, and I did my best to show my appreciation by being flexible and willing to help the team however needed. In working with Dr. Savage, I was able to gain knowledge of the area we researched, as well as a big-picture understanding of both where I fit into the project and where the project fits into the larger body of the research. Although Dr. Savage was busy leading multiple research projects, he still found the time to help and even have lunch with us. Dr. Savage also gave me the opportunity to work closely with his team, and the externs were integrated into the daily research process and supervised by Dr. Savage and other post-doctoral researchers on his group. The biggest surprise was to see my picture and bio included on Dr. Savage’s website of people on his research team, which includes post-graduate, graduate, college, and other high school students.

I appreciate that Dr. Savage showed me how I could use my interests and skills to give back to my community by applying abstract knowledge learned in school to help improve the lives of others. I would recommend ������Ƶ’s EXPLORE program because it encourages and challenges students to achieve new goals and to explore alternative fields of study. It also helps students gain a realistic perspective of a premier university research environment as well as affording students the opportunity to expand their network of academic mentors.

Would you like to be connected with a professional mentor this summer? Applications are due by April, 16th.

Read Part 1 of the series .

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As an intern at the UCLA Department of Biomathematics for the past two summers, I have developed as a researcher, as well as a person, under the mentorship of Dr. Van Savage. Two years ago, when I first started the , I had no idea what biomathematics was. All I knew was that it sounded fun and I was excited to learn more. Dr. Savage shared my same enthusiasm about what I was learning and was extremely involved, sharing papers, presentations, and websites – anything that would help me become a better researcher. He gave me opportunities to work with other talented students and postdoctorates, whom I learned a great deal from.

My first year work involved comparing two versions of vessel extraction software, Angicart and Angicart++, and studying the theory behind scaling properties of blood vessel networks. I ran 3D angiographic image data through software to output blood vessel properties. I also taught myself MATLAB and developed code that I used to study the outputted properties and calculate scaling ratios. Dr. Savage helped me through every step along the way, always available to answer questions, providing me a place to work, and making sure that I was learning and having fun.

I was incredibly excited when Dr. Savage mentioned the prospect of me coming back to work with him this past summer. I had made significant progress over the six weeks I spent working in his lab the summer before, and I was eager to continue where I left off. From my data mining and machine learning classes I took at school that year, I learned the basics of various classification methods such as decisions trees, principal component analysis, and neural networks and implemented the methods in Python. With my knowledge of machine learning tools and GitHub, I wrote a Python notebook for the project that can be shared with others. In my code, I used Python’s logistic regression functions and support vector machine functions in the scikit-learn package to study the differences between animal vasculature and plant vasculature. The functions I wrote clean datasets  from the C++ vessel extraction software, then plot and analyze the data with decision boundaries. Dr. Savage and I are now working on a research paper summarizing the results of this project.

I learned from my research experience with Dr. Savage that research requires both perseverance and passion. Often, I would spend hours and hours working on a single function in the data analysis process without even knowing if the analysis was going to prove useful. This year, while working on classifying animal and plant networks, it took weeks to collect the angiographic images, generate a large enough dataset, and clean the data.

Despite how challenging and time-consuming the research was, I learned so much and truly enjoyed it. Dr. Savage helped me fully discover my passion in interdisciplinary computer science and biology research. I improved my coding skills, applied knowledge I gained in class to real data, and learned how to present my findings more effectively. These skills have helped me better communicate my ideas to other people.

Throughout the project, I constantly came up with new ideas and questions that I could ask Dr. Savage, and he further fueled my creativity and drive. Through Dr. Savage’s mentorship, I became fascinated by the way nature abides to mathematical laws and the predictive power of new computing technologies. I became eager to learn more about the interrelatedness of biology and computer science, and I developed skills that I will be using for the rest of my life.

Would you like to be connected with a professional mentor this summer? Applications are due by April, 16th.

Read Part 2 of the series .

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Mark Erlandson, the parent of a gifted student who presently attends a boarding school out East, is a former lawyer and public high school English teacher from Wisconsin starting a new business as a legal writing consultant.

“You can be anything you want to be” is a cliche we all will probably tell, or have already told, our children at some time in their lives. For the gifted child, this statement may be closer to the truth. But having too many skills and abilities and multiple interests can be overwhelming, and what exactly does “anything” mean? How do we help the gifted student to understand what the “anything” is and to find the right career match?

To begin, two caveats: technological innovation and economic globalization have brought about swift change to the practice and outlook of many occupations and will continue to do so. Therefore, the goal of much early career planning should be to explore and understand the nature and variety of work available, not to choose a specific career. At most, paint in broad strokes and identify career areas that a child may want to enter.

Second, children’s interests often change as they mature. What once lit that flame of enthusiasm in 8th grade may have diminished by junior year of high school. That is natural. Expect your child’s passions to ebb and flow as he or she ages, becoming exposed to and participating in life’s experiences and learning more about themselves.

At the elementary school age, children need to just learn about the world of work in general. Begin by explaining your own job, both the advantages and disadvantages. It is called work and not play for a reason. Then have other relatives and friends explain their jobs and what they like or dislike about them. Ask your child to picture himself or herself in that job and what he or she would like or dislike about it. Try to stay away from the salary as a motivating factor. (The need for financial literacy is a topic for another day.) When you are out in public, point out the people working. Speculate with your child about that occupation’s advantages and disadvantages and how he or she would enjoy it. In all these situations, ask how the job contributes to society and what needs of people it meets.

Another way to begin discussion about possible employment is to connect current events with the world of work. Discuss, for instance, what occupations might have been affected by the drought in California or the political instability of the Middle East and how.

As children enter middle school and high school, research becomes important. An excellent resource is the . Another place for extensive information on careers is . Both sites break the work world into fields like Architecture and Engineering, Computer and Information Technology, and Business and Financial. They then provide information on the tasks involved in the career, the working conditions, the size of the occupation, the expected rate of growth and future prospects, the training involved or expected, the earnings, and the career ladder among other things. Other useful websites include , , and .

(A career in the military should not be ignored, though this is another topic best left for another day. Perhaps surprisingly, Forbes lists the three service academies among the top 30 on its “America’s Top Colleges List.”)

Don’t forget to use your library’s resources. Some helpful sources include the Encyclopedia of Careers and Vocational Guidance (R331.7 ENC); The Dictionary of Occupational Titles (R371.42); and Career Discovery Encyclopedia (R331.7 CAR). There are also many books on specific careers or career fields. For instance, there are books about nursing and books on careers in health care.

Of course, job shadowing provides some of the most realistic evidence of what a job is really like. This is as close as you can come to actually practicing the occupation. It can also dispel common misconceptions formed through such sources as television. For example, many children are surprised that the career of a forensic scientist is nothing like that seen on the CSI programs. Many companies now have formal job shadowing programs. Be sure to check their websites. But don’t be afraid to just call a business informally, as most companies will be happy to allow someone to job shadow. Contacting the human resource department is often a great place to start as is using relatives and acquaintances to network. Prepare for the experience by researching the occupation as outlined above and preparing a list of questions to ask. Don’t forget to send a thank-you note afterwards.

As the ancient Delphic maxim states, “Know thyself.” Once a child matures and can accurately identify and understand his or her personality, interests, skills and values, self-assessment becomes a critical part of the career exploration process.

Personality tests help students to understand themselves. One of the most common, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), divides people into four dichotomies: Extroversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. These results are then used to place people into 16 personality types, e.g., INTP or ESFJ. Personality types can be matched with occupations that fit them. While the actual MBTI requires a certified professional to both administer and interpret (See for more information), a similar Jungian personality test may be taken for free at .

Interest inventories like the Strong Interest Inventory can provide additional information about self. Social scientists have found that interests in activities related to the world of work can be divided into six categories: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. Combinations of these interests can be matched with various careers. For example, scientists tend to have strong interests in the areas of Realistic and Investigative while architects tend to be interested in the areas Artistic, Investigative and Realistic.

Of course, it is not enough to just be interested in a career; you must also have the necessary skills and abilities. The U.S. Department of Labor to identify a child’s skills that it then matches with careers that require that skill set. You can also start by identifying an occupation and then take a shorter assessment focusing only on the skills required by that occupation.

One final area, which is often ignored in the career exploration process, is work values. Satisfaction with one’s job is not just that it suits one’s personality and that he or she is good at it, but that it is similar to one’s values. For example, how important is it that the job provides recognition in the form of promotions or praise or that the job contributes to the betterment of society. Ultimately, this area might be the most crucial one leading to a long and satisfying career.

Picking the wrong career can lead to lifelong dissatisfaction, even burn-out, and waste the potential of the gifted child. To conclude with another cliche, “knowledge is power,” the power to avoid just such a situation.

Do you know a gifted high school student interested in learning more about a potential career field through hands-on experience? Check out !

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