Guidance Counselors

Your best resource for information about work as a guidance counselor is right in your own high school. Ask your school's counselor how he or she got started in the career, and about the nature of the job. You may even be allowed to assist your counselor with a variety of projects like career days or college recruitment. With your counselor's help, you can identify some of the particular issues affecting your fellow students and come up with ways to address the issues with special projects. You can also get a sense of a counselor's job by working on the school newspaper. As a reporter, you'll have the opportunity to interview students, get to know their concerns, and write editorials about these issues.

The ACA publishes a great deal of information about the field of professional guidance. Its Web site (http://www.counseling.org) features many articles about counseling; ACA also produces a monthly publication called Counseling Today (http://ct.counseling.org).