For my career interview, I was lucky enough to have the pleasure to interview Adrienne Cossom. Adrienne is a counsellor/social worker, and she provided me not only with information on counselling but also the career world in general. While it might seem obvious, one point Adrienne made that really stuck with me is that the first thing you should consider when choosing a career is yourself – your personal interests, needs, strengths, and weaknesses. While it might seem obvious, there is a lot of pressure to try to go for a career that makes the most money, or that people would find respectable. It’s true that the amount of money you can make is a huge aspect of choosing a career, but what’s the point in substantial amounts of wealth if you aren’t happy? You want to choose a job that interests you, and something that doesn’t stress you out too much. Additionally, the flexibility you have within your career is another huge factor. My second key takeaway is most jobs have many lessons that only come with on-the-job training. No matter how much you study and prep, you’re definitely not going to learn everything in school. For example, Adrienne recalled that at the beginning of her career, she was quite self-conscious about the outcomes of her counselling sessions (how a patient’s mood is at the end of the session). Through experience in her career, Adrienne learned that the success of the outcomes came not from experience but from the connection between her and her patient. Finally, you don’t really need to have a clear, straight path from high school graduation to your career. In fact, the career you end up with is likely going to be very different from what you were aiming for at the end of Grade 12. In Adrienne’s case, she has an undergrad degree in political science and Japanese, and she didn’t really take any courses relating to social work at all. For the first two years of university, she mainly just took what interested her: astronomy, theatre, political science, and a few art courses. Therefore, it’s not a big deal if you don’t have a clear plan of what you want to do.