How to Find Your Career Path When You Have No Idea

If you're in high school or early college and you don't know what you want to do with your life, you're not behind. You're normal.

About 30% of college students change their major at least once. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows only 27% of college graduates end up working in a field related to their major.

Sources: National Center for Education Statistics (2023). Federal Reserve Bank of New York, "The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates" (2024).

Figuring out your path is a process, not a decision you make once and stick to. Here's what actually helps.

1. Follow what you're actually curious about

Angela Duckworth's research on grit found that passion and persistence predict success more than raw talent. But you can't be passionate about something you picked because it sounded good on paper.

A more useful question than "what do I want to be?" is: What do I already read about voluntarily? What problems do I find interesting? When does time disappear?

Source: Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner.

2. Talk to actual people in the field

Job descriptions tell you the requirements. They don't tell you what the work actually feels like. Research shows students who conduct informational interviews, simply asking someone in a field about their experience, make more confident and realistic career choices.

Source: Crosby, O. (2010). "Informational Interviewing: Get the Inside Scoop on Careers." Occupational Outlook Quarterly.

Some questions worth asking:

• What does a typical week actually look like?
• What do you wish you'd known before getting into this?
• What's the part nobody warns you about?
• Would you do it again?

That's genuinely what Mentino is built for. Find someone in a field you're considering and just ask them.

3. Try things before you commit

Stanford researchers Bill Burnett and Dave Evans call it "prototyping": low-stakes experiments that let you test whether you actually like something before it becomes a major decision. Shadow someone for a day. Start a project related to the field. Volunteer somewhere relevant. You learn more in two weeks of doing than two years of thinking about it.

Source: Burnett, B., & Evans, D. (2016). Designing Your Life. Knopf.

4. Build skills that work everywhere

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report lists the skills employers most want through 2027: analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, self-awareness, curiosity. None of them are field-specific. While you're figuring out your direction, focus on these. They compound no matter what you end up doing.

Source: World Economic Forum, "Future of Jobs Report 2023."

5. Don't specialize too soon

Economist Ofer Malamud compared students who specialized early vs. those who explored broadly first. The broad explorers ended up in better-fitting careers and reported higher satisfaction. There's a cost to narrowing too quickly.

Source: Malamud, O. (2010). "Breadth versus Depth: The Timing of Specialization in Higher Education." Labour, 24(4), 349-369.

The short version

The Role of Identity in Career Choice

A lot of career confusion isn't about the career — it's about identity. "Who am I?" is a harder question than "what job should I have?" and students often mix them up. Psychologist James Marcia's research on identity development found that most teenagers are either in "moratorium" (actively exploring, unsettled) or "foreclosure" (committed to an identity they didn't actually choose — often because their parents chose it for them).

If you feel pressure to commit to a path before you're ready, that pressure is usually external. Your parents, your school's college counselor, college apps — they all want a tidy story. But committing early to the wrong thing is a much more expensive mistake than taking time to explore.

Source: Marcia, J.E. (1966). "Development and validation of ego-identity status." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3(5), 551-558.

What Actually Helps

Career counselors, personality tests, and online quizzes are a starting point at best. The research consistently shows that the most effective career exploration happens through two things: direct experience and conversations with people who are already doing the work.

Direct experience means internships, part-time jobs, projects, competitions, or just building something related to the field. Not reading about it — doing a version of it. Conversations with people already in the field give you information you genuinely cannot get anywhere else: what a random Tuesday feels like, what skills actually matter vs. what looks good on paper, whether the day-to-day matches the hype.

Both of these require initiative. Nobody sends you an invitation. The good news is that reaching out to people is easier now than it's ever been — and most professionals are more willing to talk to curious students than you'd expect.

Your career doesn't have to be a straight line, and it probably won't be. The most interesting ones rarely are. Explore, talk to real people, try things. Clarity comes from doing, not from sitting and thinking harder about it. Stop waiting to have it figured out and start having conversations with people who can help you figure it out.