The dilemma of choosing a path after HSC

“What do you want to become?”

There are many who don’t know how to answer that question. I am one of them. Not because I’ve never wanted anything; quite the opposite. There have been too many things, too many tiny fascinations that refuse to stand in a neat line behind one another. I have wanted lives that do not seem to belong to only one person.

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That is where the difficulty begins. HSC ends, and with it comes the strange departure from a life that had been structured for 12 years by routine. Overnight, everyone around you seems to know exactly where they are going. There is an uncertainty in watching friends move forward with plans they have envisioned for years. Someone has enrolled in medical coaching because they wanted to be a doctor since they were seven, another started preparing for engineering just after passing SSC, while someone has built their whole personality around the prestige of an institution they aspire to be in.

Then there is the discomfort of not knowing. The examinations have barely ended when the questions begin arriving from every direction: from relatives over the phone, from friends comparing admission plans. “What are you doing for admissions?”, “Medical or BUET?”, “Which university?”. The questions are ordinary enough, but when there is no definite answer to give, even a simple inquiry can begin to feel like an interrogation. The country has already decided that the moment HSC ends, there is no time left to pause. The coaching centres soon begin calling one number after another. The voices on the other end speak with such urgency that for a while you wonder whether you have already fallen behind.

How can anyone fall behind in a life that hasn’t even begun?

We rarely speak about how narrow the path ahead can seem after HSC. In most of our Bangladeshi households, we are taught since childhood about what a “successful” future is supposed to look like. The idea of a “successful” future is often concentrated around a handful of familiar destinations: medical colleges, top engineering institutions, and the most sought-after public universities. These possibilities offer recognition, security, and the potential that can be explained easily to relatives with pride. There is nothing inherently wrong with choosing these paths; many of those who choose them are genuinely passionate about what they do.

The problem rooted here is that safety has become so synonymous with success that uncertainty looks like recklessness to us. Stepping outside of the familiar feels like making a dangerous mistake.

This is why, for a student who is still lingering in his coming-of-age period of life and does not yet know what he wants to pursue, an unconventional choice can feel irresponsible when it shouldn’t be. The fear of choosing the wrong subject, disappointing one’s parents, and the taunts of neighbour aunties. These fears are not trivial for a country where it takes years to build financial stability. Frightened by the possibility of getting it wrong at the turning point of their life, students simply end up choosing what everyone else is choosing. They inherit others' dreams, never discovering what theirs truly meant.

We ask young people to decide what they will become at an age when they are still becoming themselves, and we underestimate how much of a contradiction that is. Decisions eventually have to be made. There are deadlines for applications, and at some point, the undecided path has to become a direction.

Research by psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec found that while actions tend to produce regret in the short term, failures to act tend to become more prominent regrets over time. Their study suggests that the things we never did can haunt longer than the things we tried and later wished we had done differently.

So before choosing, there are things a student can do. I began to understand this during an international summer programme, where I met students from different educational systems and noticed how deliberately some of them approached their choices. They researched university courses, compared possibilities, spoke to people already studying or working in fields they were considering, and allowed themselves to change their minds as they learned more. We can do the same. Look beyond the name of a degree and understand what its coursework actually involves, what careers it can lead to, and what those careers look like in reality.

There should be room to arrive at decisions honestly. A student who takes a little longer in finding a calling is not necessarily wasting time. The important thing is that when the time comes to choose, the life being chosen should not belong to the opinion of the crowd.

Reference:

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1994). The Temporal Pattern to the Experience of Regret.

Ramisa Rubaba Rashed is a born poet, daydreaming singer, stuck in the disguise of a wannabe biologist, and a full-time cat-mom. Send her your songs at raemsi.ruby@gmail.com.