Choosing your SHS track might be widely similar to choosing your course for college, which also feels like choosing your life path. At age 15 or 16, you might find it a bit difficult to decide what type of career you want but, with proper self-reflection and assessment, you’ll come up with a sound and mature decision.
While some decide on their path based on others’ advice, others will look inwards and try to find the best career depending on their personality, like wants, needs, and dreams.
Tracks and Strands
To know which SHS track best suits your personality, it’s best to enumerate just what these tracks are. STEM, ABM, and HUMSS tend to be misidentified as tracks, when it truth, these are strands that are under different tracks. Currently, there are four different senior high tracks, these are the following: Academic track, Technical-Vocational Livelihood Track, Sports Track and lastly, the Arts and Design Track.
Academic Strand
The Academic Track prepares you for subject specialization for the course you want to take in college. Under this track are the General Academic Strand (GAS), Humanities and Social Sciences Stand (HUMSS), Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Strand (STEM) and the Accountancy, Business and Management Strand (ABM).
HUMSS, STEM, and ABM are self-explanatory strands, since their titles explain what you’ll learn in these programs. The GAS strand, on the other hand, is often relegated as the strand of the students who are not sure of what they want — but that’s not a bad thing since you have more freedom to choose your path.
While the GAS strand doesn’t specialize with humanities, sciences, and economics, it does offer a wide and extensive list of subjects that will equip a student with the basic knowledge that can propel them to the course they want to pursue, once they’ve decided what it is.
Technical-Vocational Livelihood Track
This strand invests largely on skills that can help students gain Certificates of Competency or National Certifications that will help them land a job after graduation, in industries like agriculture, economics and information technology. Under this track are the Agri-Fishery Arts Strand, Home Economics Strand, Industrial Arts Strand and, Information and Communications Technology Strand.
Sports Track
The Sports Track offers subjects that foster an understanding of the basic principles and techniques related to physical education and recreation. This includes mental, psychological and social development.
Safety and First Aid is also a large part of this track, making sure that its students don’t only know the principles on how to foster leadership and sports management but also how to take care of themselves and their future athletes or clients.
Arts and Design Track
Meanwhile, the Arts and Design Track, as the name suggests, aims to expose students to the opportunities in the art world, disproving the common notion that there’s no job waiting for artistic students. In this track, students are exposed to different media like graphic design, painting, fashion design, photography, film, and architecture.
Which track best suits your personality?
First, differentiate a passing interest from a deep one; balance what you’re good at and what you want. No person is ever one-dimensional, a student with an aptitude for science might also love graphic design. Best take into account your strengths and weakness, the jobs opportunities you may have after graduation, the economy’s status and your desires.
Once you figure out which track you want to be a part of and which strand you want to pursue under it, look for nearby schools that offer it or at least a close variation of it.
At the end of the day, want is not always enough to be the reason behind choosing a track – or anything else, for the matter. However, it’s also best to remember that this is not the only determining factor when it comes to your future. It’s not the end all and be all, but, it does help a lot.
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