Repository: UIHistories Project: Booklets - Facts for Freshmen (1914) [PAGE 10]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

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UNIVERSITY OF [LLINOIS

The choice of a profession, of a college course, should

not be dependent, as it too often is, upon cither chan

or our

associations. In choosing a course from Individual the long list of courses which the UniShould Choose versity offers the decision should he left very largely to you as an individual. Thl work you are to follow you should yourself select. Your father and mother may express preferences, your teachers and friends may give advice, but after all it is you who an to live the life, and do the work, and succeed or fail. You should listen to the advice, and have regard for the preferences, but you should not be dominated by them. First of all you should determine the sort of work for which you are best fitted. You will be helped in this selfanalysis by studying your work in the high Personal school, and determining from this what Fitness you have done most successfully. Your Necessary friends and teachers will be able to help you in this regard, though they may sometimes be prejudiced in your favor, and decide that you can do a thing well because they desire you to do it well. If you do not enjoy mathematics, and if you get on with difficulty in these subjects, you are not likely to be a succe ful engineer; if literature and language do not appeal to you, and if you have little imagination or love of the beautiful, you should not elect to be either a poet or an architect; if you have been awkward and unsuccessful in the chemical or biological laboratory you should in all probability not make science your major subj< t. Besides studying your own fitness for a ^ ursi f stud your choice may very well be influenced 1\\ what you like. If you like your work you will go at it

Choose What

You Like

with more energy and enthusi

in than if

it were distasteful to u. and so you will be vers much more like!) than otherwise t

lo it well. No matter how admirably we ma) be situated in

the work in which we arc engaged, (here will conn rtgularl] the difficult, or the Un< pectcd situation. Iheic .it. alw;n