A recent survey conducted by the Child Welfare League Foundation ranked athletes, chefs, engineers, actresses and hairdressers as the most popular career aspirations among junior-high-school students in Taiwan.
The findings, which present a diverse range of occupations that mark a break from traditionally prized jobs such as doctors or lawyers, suggest that adolescents are increasingly tending to make their own career decisions based on information from the media, instead of simply reflecting the wishes of their parents, foundation executive director Chen Li-ju (陳麗如) said.
“Many of today’s adolescents are attracted to careers that offer ‘peak experiences,’ meaning sudden bursts of fame, such as those enjoyed by professional athletes or celebrity chefs,” she told a press conference in Taipei yesterday.
Chen added that parents or other mentors should educate youth about the effort and perseverance required to attain a successful career in these fields.
According to the survey, which was conducted earlier this year among 1,710 teenagers aged 13 to 14, the top three career choices among boys were professional athletes, chefs and engineers; while girls stated their preference to become actresses, chefs and hairdressers or manicurists.
However, 37 percent of the respondents said they were uncertain about their career aspirations, while 25 percent said they did not know which subjects interested them most.
The survey also found that more than 60 percent of the respondents expected less than NT$30,000 in monthly wages for their first job.
Tsai Chan-yuan (蔡瞻遠), a middle-school student who was invited to speak at the press conference, said she started to make money through online auctioning while she was still in elementary school and preferred a career that would allow her to work from home.
“I prefer work that would allow more personal freedom, such as online auctioning, instead of getting squeezed into a cramped office space with a lot of other people,” Tsai said.
She added that she would like to start a business of her own, since many jobs offered an entry salary of only NT$22,000.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching