Career Counselling for High School Students | Roadmap Education

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Ep 56 - VCE Subjects: 5 Things to Consider When Choosing Yours

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What we’re talking about:

This episode is a solo episode where I answer a question that is coming up a lot with the families and students I’m working with at the moment. Today’s focus is choosing VCE subjects and I go through 3 things that I’d like you to focus on as you choose them, and 2 things I want you to ignore and not pay attention to so that you choose a set of subjects that will work for you.

2:57 - What subjects do you like? 

Choosing VCE subjects based on what you like will actually help lead you towards a course and career that you’ll like. It gives you the chance to better explore the areas you’re already leaning towards to work out if it actually is the right path for you, and it also just makes VCE more enjoyable.

7:33 - What are the prerequisites for the types of courses you might be interested in?

I give some tips to help you start working out what courses you might like, and then recommend you find out what the prerequisites are now to make sure you have them covered. I also want you to recognise that there’s often not a lot of subjects that you'll have to do to meet the entry requirements.

9:39 - What are the subject adjustments for the courses you’re interested in? 

While the subjects you can get an adjustment for aren’t prerequisites, they give an indication of what might be covered in the course you’re looking at, and if you do well in them, you can get a boost to your selection rank to help you meet the ATAR requirement for the course.

13:08 - Don’t focus on scaling when choosing your VCE subjects. 

Learn about how scaling actually works so that you can see that choosing subjects based on whether they scale up or down won’t really help you get a better ATAR.

17:22 - Let go of what VCE subjects you think you SHOULD do

Don’t choose a subject just because you think you should do it. Is it a subject that you might need later on? Is it related to what you are interested in? Great, then do it. If you don’t like it, and it’s only a prerequisite for the types of courses that you’re not interested in anyway, why make VCE harder than it needs to be?

Links mentioned:

Discuss the podcast and get free career counselling advice here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/vcecourseandcareerchat

VTAC CourseSearch: https://delta.vtac.edu.au/coursesearch/#/search

My website: https://www.roadmapeducation.com

Check out career planning digital resources here: https://www.roadmapeducation.com/resources