Chapter One

I sat down to write this blog and just thought about our first day of class and how we talked about our own career history.  I never really gave it much thought because I knew what I wanted to do.  It was really interesting to see how I got to where I am today.   Then I started to process what we have done in our lives and what we have experienced has shaped who we are and what we want to do. 

When going through Brown’s (2012) text, he talks about the economic status of individuals and how their lives are shaped by that status.  Which then lead me to think about an article that I read for a different graduate school interview.  The article was about how different the education system is from the northern states to the southern states and economic status.  It showed that because of the lack of resources and educational opportunity in southern states due to lower income rates that students from these schools were more likely to get into trouble and put into the judicial system.  The article talked more about how African Americans had lower wages in the south than the north and could have played a critical role in the number of them in prison.  So, I bring this up because I wrote a response to this saying that if we could give more money to the southern schools, that the poverty and the crime rate might go down because they would have a better educational system.  I also talk about if the government would do that, then there would be less unemployment money going out as well as a decrease in money going into prisons. Overall, this would help to benefit society.  I think that as a role of a school counselor, we have the opportunity to make a difference in student’s future careers through this knowledge.

This article then brings me back to the text as well as our class and how the education system affects the future lives of children.  This belief is reiterated when Brown (2012) states, “economic status, quality of basic and advanced education, and values passed on by the family and others influence career choice and occupational attainment” (2012, p. 5).  My mind then thought about our assignment for the Genogram and how we are suppose to look at our family histories and their careers and compare them to where we are today.  I think that this class is full circle.  We learn the importance of how our experiences and histories affect our lives and then we are to critically analyze our own personal lives through the Genogram.  I think this is going to be very useful so when we are actually in the field we can apply this knowledge. 

Brown, D. (2012). Career information, career counseling, and career development (10^th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.