Before the stress of exams and third-level applications kicks in, make good use of Transition Year by having a leisurely look at your career options, writes Louise Holden

The hardest part of scoring a good job is not the study, the points race or the interview process. For most of us, the tricky part is choosing the career. The occasional student knows from first year what they want "to be"; they are the lucky ones. The rest of us fish around for ideas, afraid to head down the wrong path, limited by our lack of knowledge of what's out there.

To complicate the issue, school isn't the best place to learn about college and work. The education system, for all its strengths, rarely lights up career paths or prepares us for the realities of life in an office or other work environment. Transition Year, on the other hand, provides a window out of the classroom and a chance for students to discover their place in the working world. Transition Year projects in the areas of community work, the arts, sciences and business give students a chance to test skills that are rarely used in the classroom.

Brian Mooney, chairman of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors, advises all students to seize the opportunity that Transition Year offers. The curriculum includes a module that enables students to sample all Leaving Certificate subjects and see which ones appeal. While your Leaving Cert subject choices may not necessarily shape your career, they will certainly have an impact on third-level study choices. If you choose the wrong subjects for you, it may cost you in years spent trying to get on to a different career track.

During Transition Year, students get a chance to have a long think about Leaving Cert subject choices.

"Pay attention to your interests as well as your aptitudes," Mooney advises. Don't ignore your talent at decorating your bedroom or your enjoyment of the voluntary community work you may be doing. Any project that lights your fire is worth investigation, even if it never occurred to you before Transition Year.

Look at the combination of your interests and aptitudes. If you did well at science in the Junior Cert and you seriously enjoyed your role as sales manager in the Transition Year mini-company, then maybe you should look at a career that combines these two skills, such as a sales role in a pharmaceutical company. Talk to your careers guidance counsellor about the kind of university courses that would take you on that path. Get in touch with the human resources departments of pharmaceutical companies and ask them what they are looking for in a sales rep, what the salaries are like, what the job entails, and so on. Find people who work in the area and pick their brains.

Sean McEvoy, who heads the careers service at University College Cork, is thrilled with the opportunity Transition Year provides for starting a career search. Without it, he says, many students are left to make life-changing decisions in the middle of the pressured exam years when they do not have the luxury of leisurely research.

Here's one excellent idea for a Transition Year project:

"Get the CAO handbook and three highlighter pens," says McEvoy. "Go through the 350-odd college course titles and highlight the ones you'd never consider, the ones you might like and the ones you'd definitely like. Ignore factors such as geography or points, just focus on the courses themselves."

This exercise will give you an idea of where your interests lie. The next step is to gather as much information as you can about all the courses you have chosen in your "best" list, by visiting the college website or contacting the admissions office to order a prospectus). Now study, in detail, the exact content of the courses and begin the process of elimination again.

"Many of the college students who come to me worried that they have chosen the wrong course did not know what the course was really about when they started," says McEvoy. "They chose based on the college, the points and course title and they didn't really take the time to find out what was involved."

Two college courses with the same name might be quite different in content, McEvoy warns. There are dozens of business courses available across the country. Some focus on economics, some on administration, some on entrepreneurship - each has a different focus.

If you hate economics, make sure you don't choose a course where a third of the final mark goes on the economics exam.

If, by the time you've gone through your "best" list, you have ruled out most of the options, for whatever reason, you can then revisit your "maybe" list and start again. If you do this in Transition Year, McEvoy promises, you will take a great deal of the panic out of the Leaving Cert and you'll be thinking in terms of college before exam stress even begins.