The first piece of advice I would give you is: do not bother trying to decide, as a junior in high school, what you want to do with the rest of your life. Unless you are already -- and not just right now, but since you were yay high -- inhabited with a great passion for something in particular, if you try to decide now what you want to do with the rest of your life, you will guess wrong. You are essentially choosing blindly. You don't know yourself well enough yet, and still less do you know what your options truly are.

You should have a stock answer prepared when people ask you the question, because people will ask you the question and it's easiest just to recite that to get them off of your back. It can be a likely-sounding lie. Your job is to keep the question-askers placated while you're exploring your options.

Now, I think that the idea of choosing "what I want to be when I grow up" and then organizing the next 6 to 10 years of your life around the accomplishment of that goal is not the best way to go.

First, think about what motivates you. This is probably something that doesn't change a whole lot as you grow -- less than people like to think, I would bet. Do you want to be rich and don't care what you have to do to get that? Do you want to just enjoy your leisure time and get the easiest, least disagreeable job that could possibly work? Do you want to be famous or powerful? Do you want to change the world and cure diseases and save babies? Do you want to spend a lot of time with people, or instead do you want to spend a lot of time working independently on hard problems and increasing your knowledge? I think that a person's tendencies in these directions are already apparent in high school. Look around at the people you know at school and you can sort of see how they sort themselves out. Now look at yourself and do the same.

Second, think about what interests you. What are your favorite classes? What kind of books do you like to read? (Or do you not like to read?) What are your hobbies? Don't list anything you think you ought to be interested in... don't list any books that you think you should read but you haven't ever bothered to read.... don't say "playing violin" if you actually dread picking up your violin or going to your violin lessons. What are your guilty pleasures? What would you do if you had lots of free time and no one was around to say "Are you doing THAT again?"

Third, explore these areas. Start where you are, and work outward. This is the opposite of the 6-to-10 year, "what I want to do with the rest of my life" plan. This is taking small steps. This is allowing yourself to change course easily at any time, whenever you realize your desires conflict with your stated goals.

What I mean is this: look around you, at the options available to you NOW, and whenever you have to pick something to do at your school (which classes to take, what to do for a project), as a job, or in your spare time, pick the thing that (a) looks the most interesting and fun to you, and (b) is the most likely to advance you towards the kind of life that highly motivates you. (I.e. if you want to be rich, the one that will move you towards a better-paying job; or if you want to get smart and work on smart-people things, the one that looks most intellectually challenging)

We have to make these kind of decisions all the time anyway, but I think we tend to make them for the wrong reasons, and without thinking. DON'T necessarily do what you think you ought to do to meet people's expectations (but don't use it as an excuse to be lazy either), and DO always be mindful of the questions "Which one really looks interesting and fun?" And "Which one will move me a step closer to having the sort of job I would like and living the sort of life I would like to live?"

Obviously the necessary condition for making choices is that one has freedom to do so. Sometimes you just have to do what they tell you, especially in high school. Sometimes you just have to flip burgers because you desperately need the money and that's the only job they'll hire a 16-year-old to do. But be on the lookout for opportunities to learn more about yourself by following your interests, and to learn more about your options by observing or even participating in environments where people are doing the sort of job you think you might be interested in doing.

(For example, your idea of being a lawyer sounds like it is based on TV and movies... there are plenty of lawyers and other people working in the field of law who aren't criminal defense lawyers... some of them are useful to society even.)

And as a rule of thumb, never commit yourself until you have to, unless you risk shutting off highly desirable avenues to yourself by doing so. And that, to actually ANSWER YOUR QUESTION includes putting off picking a major -- and especially a "what I want to be" -- as long as you reasonably can.

I changed majors so many times it made me dizzy. I could have saved myself some very boring classes and even shaved some time off the 7+ years I spent as an undergrad if I hadn't blindly chosen chemical engineering as my first major, simply because of parental pressure and because it would be a high-paying job once I got out of school... even though I am not particularly motivated by money. I should have started by taking a few classes that seemed quite interesting to me, and then based on which classes I actually did find interesting, chose the next semester's classes from there, and so on...

To the extent that you are free to choose anything in life, that's how I recommend you proceed. Learn to Know Thyself, take small steps, live nimbly enough to be able to change course quickly if you sense you are on the wrong track.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. *turns off mic* *steps off soap-box*

*randomly throws confetti*

Now I wonder if I come back in 15 years and read this, how much of it I will still agree with? Shivers!

Glad I could help. Don't let it be an excuse to piddle away your time, of course... be honest with yourself.

As far as scholarships go, they are obviously important, at least in the US where college is so expensive. But even if you got a band scholarship I'm assuming you aren't planning on being a musician later in life? So the band scholarship would just be a way to move you towards where you want to go anyway, so my advice applies.

There are tons of small (and sometimes not-so-small) and obscure scholarships out there, especially for women. A lot of times all you have to do to be considered is to have a good "resumé" in terms of grades and extra-curriculars, and write an essay.

Which leads me to another piece of advice that I wish someone had given me and gave all young people: even if you have no idea what you want to do or will do as a career, I would say the single thing that you can do now that will have the most chance of allowing you to be successful in a huge variety of careers, is to learn to write well -- especially learn to write persuasively. Anyone who ever has to write in their job -- email, grant applications, letters, RFPs, journal articles, resumé cover letters, marketing drivel, etc. -- can benefit from that. Especially stuff like email -- people think it's not worth writing well, but those things stick around, and especially since they can be so easily forwarded to others, if you can write a good, persuasive email, it can have a real impact. And it will definitely help you stand out from the pack when it comes to promotions.

Anyway I was meaning to say that writing scholarship applications is both a good use of that skill and a good way to practice it. If you keep the writing practice aspect of it in mind while you are doing it, you will benefit from the application even if you don't get the scholarship. Just sayin'.

And I love the idea of having an Internet persona... I wish I had thought of it earlier. Wouldn't it be funny if I was totally ditzy in real life? Or a 70-year-old Brazilian man? Just sayin'.

So sneaky!

No idea whatsoever. I'm leaning more towards somewhere in my state. For flexibility and comfort. However, if a out-of-state college that seems pretty interesting comes along, I might reconsider.

When people ask what I'm going to do with the rest of my life I do the same thing I did when they used to ask what I was going to major in - I make up a likely sounding lie, like Lothere said... usually something slightly different every time, just because if people feel the need for me to map the next eighty years of my life at all, let alone in one sentence for them, they don't deserve a serious answer.

Wow, that was some helpful advice. Especially now that I'm reconsidering my idea of becoming a translator! I want to print Lothere's lenghty speech, translate it, and discuss it with my counselor.

This is still good advice, even a year and a half later.