The job process is something that seems so long off for everyone, so it is a bit of a rude awakening when you get to college and you have to start to research, prepare for, and decide on a career field that you will most likely be in for the rest of your life (scary stuff). How is a freshman in college supposed to figure out the next 10 – 20 years of his life at least? Well, at least in high school, kids still have a chance to be a kid, right? Wrong. If you are a current high school lacrosse player in this decade, you now have an added pressure to deal with aside from school, parents, SATs, and growing up: the college recruiting process. Even from the time I was getting recruited to schools, the process now a days is ten times as quick as it was a couple of years ago. To put it in prospective, I attended the first sophomore day in the history of college recruiting when I was a sophomore about 4 years ago at UNC with 7 or 8 other recruits. Now, 
you have sophomores committing to schools without even playing a second of varsity lacrosse (and sometimes even freshman!) As crazy as the job process seems, the college recruiting process seems just as nuts. Now, college coaches are asking 15-year-old kids to decide where they want to go to college for four years, even though they aren’t going to college for another three years. As different as they seem, the college recruiting process and the job search have now become so similar that the only thing that seems to be separating the two is the time in your life at which they (usually) occur.
If you think about it, the similarity between the two processes could not be clearer. Both experiences start extremely early, just in different levels of schooling. Freshman in college are bombarded with career services meetings and advice from alums about employments while freshman in high school are swamped in deciding which coaches to contact and what recruiting camps to go to as they scramble to complete the questionnaires college coaches sent them. In fact, both processes have seemed to start earlier and earlier as time has gone on. Both searches are highly competitive and usually involve utilizing contacts either in the lacrosse program or the place of employment to “put the good word in for them” as they aspire to slip through that elusive “backdoor.” In each situation, you are required to plan extremely far into the future and decide on future aspirations are for the next 5 or 10 years over the course of just a couple of months, causing players/people to grow up fast.
Finally, the most intriguing similarity is the preparation that goes into both getting a job or getting recruited. Players/people are constantly doing whatever they can to boost their resume, people with credentials and players with athletic accolades. Everything they do has, more or less, the sole intention of getting them to “jump off the page” to college and job recruiters. In either situation, academics play a key role, leading to parents staying on top of their child always to do well in the classroom almost to a fault.
Bottom line: Even though your future seems like it is a long ways away, it always has a way of sneaking up on you without you realizing. Enjoy time with your friends and family but always be conscious that, if you want to do well in life, whether it is lacrosse or in the job force, it is going to take a lot of hardwork. So don’t let either process take you by surprise. Get on the wall, hit the books often, and remember that you can always improve on something.
