Career Guidance session for SSC students

The Future Smiles project at Mumbai Smiles was designed with the motto of ‘Educating Disadvantaged Youth in Mumbai and has envisioned mentoring and providing scholarships to needy and ambitious youth in the age group of 13 – 22 years from underprivileged background. It provides individual mentoring, group learning, exposure to various successful institutions and personalities and thereby a holistic development along with the social empowerment of student beneficiaries. This project also promotes Girl Child Education which ensures free education for adolescent girls in the age group of 6 – 13 years from the underprivileged families. Through counseling and capacity building, it also ensures that most of the students are enrolled in professional courses in order to empower them to rise above the poverty line and lead a life with dignity.

Recently, we organized a career guidance session for our SSC Future Smiles beneficiaries. The professional life of a student depends on the career and the course choices he/she makes during the transition years of his/her life. The objective of this session was to make students aware about various professional and vocational courses available in market and enable them to take correct decisions about their careers.

The event started with a brief introduction of Future Smiles by Vipul (Future Smiles FCO) where he explained the importance of career guidance to beneficiaries. The resource person, Mr. Amit, gave detailed explanation about various career options such as Army, Navy, Hospital, Hotel management etc. He also explained how students get easily influenced by their parents, peer pressure and how the glamour and look-and-feel offered by a particular career sometimes makes them land up in wrong careers. The right career for each person varies, based on his/her own aptitude, personality and interests. A student’s strength and interest should match with one or more of the 9 aspects of a human beings personality:-

• Logical or Mathematical Intelligence: – ability to calculate, quantify, and carry out complete mathematical operations.
• Visual intelligence:- ability to use mental imagery & artistic skills
• Bodily intelligence:- ability to use various physical skills
• Language intelligence:- ability to think in words & use language to express exact complex meanings
• Naturalistic intelligence:- it defines human psychology to connect with nature
• Musical intelligence: – ability to recognize tone, rhythm, various forms of music.
• Existential intelligence: – ability to tackle deep questions about human existence, such as meaning of life, why do we live, how we existed in this world.
• Interpersonal intelligence: – ability to understand & interact effectively with peoples.
• Intrapersonal intelligence:- ability to understand self’s thoughts & feelings & to use such knowledge in planning

Overall the session was very useful for both students and their parents. Nadaf’s parents acknowledged that this session had helped them better understand various career options for their daughter. Similarly, Pallavi Dusingh’s mother acknowledged and appreciated Mumbai smiles for organizing these kinds of sessions.

A similar session will be conducted for HSC students soon and we look forward to enlighten them too.