In Investigating Career Opportunities (2.3), you summarized three occupations, careers, you were interested in. At this point, focus on one career that you might want to pursue. Don’t worry. This is not a permanent decision; in fact, one perfectly reasonable outcome of writing this paper might be that you decide this is not the career for you!

For this essay, you will discuss the advantages and disadvantages for you of the career you have chosen. Think back to the list of what’s important in a career that you compiled in What’s Important to You in a Career? (2.1). That should help you think about what you want to discuss.

Think or your audience as a career counselor. You have an appointment in a week or two, and she has asked you to write an essay explaining what career you currently are thinking about pursuing. She will use your essay to help you with advice and guidance, so it is important that you write as thoroughly as you can about your current thinking. Be sure you use the information you acquired about the career you choose to support your decision.

If you want to use your sources most effectively to support your argument, it’s not enough to simply include them as a series of unrelated sources; you need to tie them together, explain their relationships with each other, and express your conclusions about them. This process is called synthesizing, and it is discussed in more detail in Synthesis (22.14).

Because your essay is an argument, you will want to follow the conventions for arguments. You may want to review these conventions in What Is an Argument? (18.1), The Features of Effective Arguments (18.3), and How to Answer Counterarguments (18.5).