Your life flashes before your eyes as you lean toward the light. The brightness of the computer screen that you’ve been staring at for the past half hour glares back at you with half-checked boxes. You can barely decide what to wear for the day, so how are you supposed to decide what courses to take when they could potentially alter your future?

With more and more classes being offered and the number of students constantly rising, incoming freshmen are forced to decide early on what their plans are for high school.

“I really just winged my way through high school,” senior Kaylee Stanton said.

However, winging it may not be enough to get you through the different paths offered at the high school. For almost every career, Allen offers a specifically designed path in order to make the transition into that profession easier. The only setback is that most of these paths have required prerequisites that need to be taken care of during a student’s freshman and sophomore year.

“Taking the prerequisites [for culinary] gets you one step into the door [of the culinary industry],” senior Jarrett Webb said.

So if taking the prerequisite gets you one step further, where do those who didn’t take the prerequisite go?

“No one is asking you to make up your mind right then and there on what you want to do,” Audio/Video Production teacher Kyle Juntunen said. “But it’s good to have a vision of what you’re interested in.”

According to senior Lane Bishop, freshmen are overwhelmed coming into the high school and by the initial revealing of all the offered classes, so finding information about the path they want to take becomes even more difficult.

“I wasn’t even really sure [about what classes to take], because obviously the school has a lot of different classes,” Bishop said.

In Webb’s opinion, there is only one thing that stands out as the most important when choosing a career path.

“Experience is hard to get, so it’s the number one thing you have [from the programs],” Webb said.

Because experience is so invaluable in any career, it makes sense to try to get as much of it as possible, starting in the ninth grade.

“Military experience is what I joined for,” sophomore Austin Bowers said about JROTC. “I wanted to join the Air Force Academy so I thought it would be an interesting experience to join and see how [the JROTC program] runs.”

However there are certain paths that may begin a little bit later in high school.

“[The IB program] starts in your junior year,” Stanton explained. “So you have to sign up for it at the end of sophomore year.”

On the other hand, even though the IB program starts in junior year, there are still some decisions leading up to the program that need to be made earlier.

“I’m pretty sure you should probably take a lot of Pre-AP and AP classes,” Stanton advised. “I think if you jumped from a regular to IB class, that would be a very large difference in course load.”

In fact, if a freshman made an early decision about what career they wanted to go into, the classes they choose could help them in college and by extension their profession.

“[The IB program] definitely helps in college, especially if you’re trying to go to a college overseas and an international career because your IB credits would transfer,” Stanton said.

The tracks could also be beneficial in a non-academic way.

“You get a lot of leadership skills [from JROTC] because you gain confidence and you’ve got to step up,” Bowers said.

But to gain the benefits that these paths give, one has to be dedicated to the career.

“You’ve got to be really passionate about what you’re doing,” Juntunen said. “If you are, you’re going to want to put in as much work as possible.”