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Whether it is college students in my professional orbit (being involved at Penn, meeting up with the kids of my colleagues) or supporting the two college students whose tuition I pay (Jada at Drexel and Aaron at Kansas State), a common exhortation I offer is to try new things and dig into different perspectives.
To give a tangible analogy, in the sports world, it's well-established that, even and especially in an era of early specialization, kids should not go hard in their core sport all year round, but should either rest, cross-train, or play other sports. It reduces injury risk, keeps things fresh, and provides body and mind with varying angles to enhance whatever your primary sport is.
And so it is with careers, that even if you're dead set on a particular professional track (e.g. nursing, business, engineering), it's good to take classes and do internships and seek out knowledge in lots of different disciplines. For one, most teenagers aren't dead set on a particular professional track, and if they are it's not likely they have an understanding of what else is out there that might be even better for them. Even if you're one of the rare ones that knows what they want at a young age and end up in that very profession, your success in that profession will only be enhanced by having connected with content and people in other professions.
Innovation, after all, lives primarily on the edges of multiple disciplines, and is rarely found solely within one field. My favorite example is one of the first I was aware of, in which my freshman year statistics professor at Penn, a true renaissance man, was responding to some of my hotshot Wharton classmates who knew they were going to go into finance and so why bother with science classes while in college if they could just load up on all the finance offerings this great institution could offer.
Our prof told us to look up the Black-Scholes formula for pricing derivatives, which was first expressed in the 1970s and which would eventually bring Myron Scholes and Robert Merton the Nobel Prize in 1997 (Fischer Black had passed away two years prior). It turns out that Black got his Bachelor's in Physics (and his PhD in Applied Mathematics), and when he and Scholes were creating models for valuing options, he recognized parallels between formulas that physicists had already discovered concerning thermal diffusion, specifically that just like heat from a big temperature spike dissipates gradually over time from source to surrounding areas, so do puts and calls exhibit similar behavior in reverse (at expiration the value jumps to either 0 or 1, but going back in time from there it smooths out). Black's collaborator, Scholes, had a classic finance and economics background, but Merton was also an applied math guy like Black, and Black was also influenced early in his career by a guy named Jack Treynor whose finance innovations stemmed from his engineering background.
In other words, one of the most famous and fundamental formulas in finance, which literally was Nobel-worthy, came from a group that was able to see across disciplines, borrowing insights that had been generated in one field to innovate in another.
Which is why I cringe at the binary argument nowadays that either the liberal arts are useless or they are paramount. One side thinks the future is technical so why should we read Shakespeare. Another side thinks those who learn to use AI are evil and useless, so employers should only hire humanities majors. What we need is people, and groups of people, who have been exposed to lots of perspectives: hard sciences and classical literature, Wall Street internships and outdoor excursions, learning to code and observing a city council meeting.
An 18-year-old has so many choices before them to do just this. What classes you take, what summer experiences you seek, who you make friends with - these are all things you can do with intention, regardless of how strongly you feel about what you're good at and what you want to do in life. As a middle-aged, mid-career person, I have my own set of choices. Who I reach out to to get to know better, what books I read, what organizations I pledge my time and money to. Wherever you are in life, you will be richer, as will our society as a whole, if we diversify in these ways.
To return to the sports world, think of Wayne Gretzky, Steve Nash, and Steph Curry, three elite athletes who have succeeded at the highest level without immediately recognizable physical talent. Gretzky (lacrosse) and Nash (soccer) played similar sports to their primary sports, which trained their minds and bodies to operate in different ways - spacing, angles, pace. Meanwhile Curry was the son of an NBA star so grew up dribbling a basketball, but an early love of golf honed both his hand-eye coordination and his consistent body mechanics. Imagine a modern-day parent or coach berating any of these dudes when they were kids for straying from 100 percent focus on their primary sport.
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