Mahmud Afimfiwey:See the career counselor before September
We can almost adequately predict what awaits a society that puts a logic-thirsty, eloquent and weirdly intelligent lawyer into the cockpit of an aircraft and asks the man who should be sitting, minding the business of the airplane in the courtroom.
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The pilot may not crush the passenger airplane and the lawyer may make all the money there is to legitimately earn by getting people off the sharp hooks of the law but in the end, when we draw the final balance sheet and weigh the gains against the losses, the pilot could have served society smiling and doing a lot more pro-bono cases and bringing justice to people with no resources to afford it.
The lawyer with the talents and waves of flair to excel flying jets and later lecturing in some of the renowned aviation schools around the world may never have anything close to job satisfaction.
Anytime this lawyer reflects over her vocation, no matter what those of us outside think of the career and how successful we think and believe the former is, she regrets every breath she draws sitting in the court room.
The Ghana case
The educational institutions in Ghana have a certain billion-dollar setback with present danger and sure future peril. So enormous and conspicuous is this danger that it irks, hurts and even makes you want to commit suicide when the leadership, be they elephant riders or seeking refuge under some giant umbrellas, miss this point.
The opportunities afforded the Ghanaian children in preschools, the adolescents in basic schools all the way until they are ready for advanced learning are inadequate at best and virtually lacking in worse case scenarios.
The advanced world used to be the measuring rod but with the rise of China, the Asian Tigers, India and currently Brazil, the standards have broadened, affording us another education paradigm that we can “copy and paste”.
Parents have always had a highly defining roles to play in identifying the talents and skills predispositions of their children as early as when they arrive in the world. But when you infer from statistics typical of Ghana, the numbers of the unlettered, the semi-educated and the mis-educated, you can but agree that the burden of identifying talents in the school child rests more on the shoulders of the teacher than the parents at home.
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But when we have overlooked or ill-performed these career preparatory assignments and the child is now due for tertiary, some damage control is possible before they take their letters from the university admissions office.
Need for an advisor
Taking a young adult to see a professional career advisor is so key that this brief encounter usually forestalls putting an astute entrepreneur in the cockpit and a potential world class pilot in agricultural extension services work.
Universities are trying as hard as they can with their often wickedly overstretched facilities and unreasonably overloaded human resources to provide this kind of career counseling. But the tragedy of the public universities is that when you enroll several hundreds of young people, you would be a dangerous joke when you put one man in charge of counseling these hundreds.
By the time this counselor truly advises the last student, the most famished camel would have passed through the eye of the needle.
If you are a first generation graduate in your family and have no parents who understand the usefulness of career guidance, experiment on your own. Take the course you are offered (if it is too late to change this) but follow the lead of your basic instinct.
Countless prospects lay in wait to welcome and later awe people who are going beyond the society’s imposed vocations.
It does not matter whether come September, the university will matriculate you into the law school, the sociology department, the medical school or even the school of business or engineering.
You can still become the lawyer for your dad and still excel in community service, writing, broadcasting and a wide range of deeply enjoyable and truly satisfying little careers that will later extend your lifespan by many more years.
For those of us in level two hundred and onwards, it is not too late to respond to the call of that basic career instinct that suggests to us loudly that we could be better, do better, serve society better and accomplish more by venturing into something unrelated to the program we are currently taking.
For when you come to think of this whole career choice thing, you would find in the stories of men and women who have enormously and positively impacted their communities, nations and even the entire globe, that the courage to dare oneself, the audacity to damn the selfishly crooked will and wild demands of an inconsiderate society are the tools we need in order to step out of the restraining shadows of our fathers, mothers, guardians and even mentors.
In our country, the stories of people who were matriculated into a business school but had to be withdrawn by the third semester abound. We have confirmed the tales of those who failed to proceed to the next level in one of our nation’s finest medical schools and eavesdropped the silent gossips of some Achimota dropout elements.
But these so-called misfits and daft are amongst those who were going to firmly hold and proudly fly our nation’s flag on the global stage and make us also matter to an increasingly predatory world.
Kojo Oppong Nkrumah never took a degree in communication (much less in radio broadcasting) before breathing into those prestigious JOY FM microphones. The man we owe so much respect for his out-of-the-ordinary style of analyzing national issues, Kweku Bakoe, never attended any of the celebrated communications schools in the EU before we knew his weight and stamina in matters of state business.
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One of the guys whose name is spoken in tons of respect and admiration in the telecom in Ghana never attended a business school before setting foot in the industry.
Ahmed Abubakar, the sweetly notorious Black Raster took a BSc. degree in Land Economics but his artistic works, which hit BBC studios even before he could graduate, got him to earn a handshake and a sincerely brotherly hug from the most powerful in the world, Obama.
And finally, the man who made us so proud as Ghanaians that we reconsidered the idea of swapping our nationalism for European or American one, the emerging gem and one of the worthiest ambassadors of a continent seen as intellectually challenged, the late sweetheart Komla Dumor, never took a degree in drama, linguistics, or communication.
But we all know what this world class broadcaster gave his forever loving family, his ever-grateful community, his poor nation and the world in his brief short existence.
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So, go for counseling wearing a mask and tell the career guru what your real motivations are. Follow them (alongside your program, if possible). You may not be another Rawlings, Kweku Baako or the legendary Dumor but you can be that man or woman who will impact society, even if it be one man at a time. GB