I have been working with students and also adults for a long time, and have advised many on what major suits them and had been instrumental in graduating a very successful group of students who had not only passed with flying colours but also found great careers that matched their ability. Sometimes though, the students would not be able to choose especially in the Gulf region as the governments provide specific scholarships and the students do not have a choice but to accept whatever is on offer. However, some students do excel and some change to another major halfway through the course, i.e. time is wasted.
This morning I had received a list of programmes with a call to parents to advise their children to take majors like AI, Data Science, Big Data, Cloud Computing, E-Commerce, Information Security, Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Programming and the other majors that resemble what we need today as we are living and will live forever in the cyberspace/computer age.
All these majors depend on the type of brain (A person can either be right-brained or left-brained. It means that one side of the brain is dominant. The left-brained dominant people are methodical and analytical in nature. Those right-brained dominant are creative and artistic). For example, if you take my brain ( I think from the test I had done, I was more inclined towards the right hemisphere of the brain) and even though I liked mathematics, I cannot say that I am a genius in resolving the bigger problems, also I like to read poetry and love art, read novels, write short stories and blogs, which means I can analyse things, I am emotional, creative and have intuition (among other traits suitable for right brain people). While many students are pushed by their parents to do majors suitable for left-brain or left hemisphere, they may not excel as they are not born with the traits that are suitable for jobs relating to programming, scientists, business analyst and mathematician.
Thus in order not to fall into advertisements on what to advise your child to do at university, and set him or her to failure, please try to understand your child from the time he or she are toddlers, as you can find characteristics that will match his/her abilities, if you find your daughter tinkering in machines and opening the watches or breaking a toy car to see how it works then that is for sure a left brain child, and if you see you son reading books, drawing art, painting on walls, and has no interest in solving his math lessons, then please do not push him to become a mathematician, he will excel at other things and will be creative nonetheless.
I find that the teachers in schools have a strong ability to decipher what category the child falls under, as not all of us can be Picasso or Micheal Anglo and not all of us can be Madam Curie or Tomas Addison. Simple tests can be devised to check on the child’s abilities to learn from the start of his or her school life the majors he or she should take.
Of course, none of that happens in our region, so we insist on a psychometric test, it has a 90-95% ability to detect the position of our ability, I mean whether its right brain or left brain. if all fails advise your children to do courses online for example:
- Code Academy – For students wanting computer science or IT
- Coursera
- Google Digital Garage – Digital skills
Please do not push your children towards a major that will alter his or her life to the worst, find out their ability first.
For more information on this topic visit: https://human-memory.net/