Vocations Research—can You Help?

[Gabriela]

[quote name='mantellata' timestamp='1340929337' post='2450201']
Have you thought about looking at / interviewing priests trained in spiritual direction as well as manuals of spiritual direction? There are many! St. Ignatius' discernment of spirits is excellent (gah - Dominican me recommending a Jesuit... almost anathema.... oh well ;p ) St. Ignatius' whole point was to achieve what you are attempting - to get at the heart of the call in order to help a person discover within themselves that "still small voice".
[/quote]

Hi mantellata,
Yes, actually! Part of what I do is look at the advice that the Church gives to discerners about discernment, to see if it matches up with the experiences I hear. (Unsurprisingly, it does!) Basically, I just try to explain [i]why[/i] that's the advice the Church gives, to show what kinds of "practical" (concrete) experiences it often leads to, so that people will be able to recognize them for what they are when they come. (Though, as I'm discovering, they're kinda' hard to mistake for anything else... Even that is useful, though. Basically, my primary conclusion so far is: If you are called, you KNOW you are called. There's no doubt about it. But I still have very few interviews...) I did not have St. Ignatius' [i]Discernment of Spirits[/i] on my list yet, though, so thank you very much for mentioning that! If anyone has any other recommended reading, I'd really appreciate the references.

And nunsense is correct: It is growing increasingly common (especially in certain disciplines, like philosophy, for example) to go straight from the BA to the PhD. Oftentimes the person will technically earn an MA in the PhD program en route to the terminal degree, but not always. As a graduate student and vocations researcher, I sometimes find this worrying. I mean, for me, the MA has been a critical time of "discernment" about my future career for me. In some disciplines, getting an MA first may indicate you "weren't sure", which can work against you in PhD applications. To me, this is another sign that our world seems to increasingly expect that you will just know what you want to do with your whole life from a very early age. In my experience, it takes some exploring. Though, those people who [i]do[/i] know straight out of college are certainly very lucky. I just think they're a very small minority... There are a lot of risks involved in going straight to the PhD. But that, as nunsense says, is for another thread!

Edited June 30, 2012 by curiousing