2012/III. szám - Hallgatói életút
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Foreword
Few may consider seriously that students were mere consumers in Higher Education. But it would also be brave to say that a BA/BsC student has the same status in belonging to a profession as a PhD student. Not to mention the participation of staff and researchers of the universities in this same professional community. The significance of tertiary studies in the context of professional development and the position of students at the beginning of their professional career is best seized by the logic that is common to the latest trends in HE pedagogy and graduate career analysis. Both focus on the professional goals of students and their fulfillment, active learning, they regard studies as preparing for later work. By drawing an analogy with the "competent infant", a paradigmatic concept of early child development in psychology, we may regard HE students as "competent professional candidates". Not characterized by complete professional "deafness" and "blindness", they are capable of efficient professional behavior, as autonomous candidates they may be engaged in proper professional interaction with others. Students' later professional performance is also profoundly shaped by their faith in their own impact and their resilient adaptation to the environment. This description of a professional candidate may sound convincing at this conceptual level, but it is equally important to answer a number of practical questions about achievements and obstacles in this phase of professional life.
Papers and interviews in our focus section about professional career and institutional counseling show that students may be characterized by their goals, motivations, and even by decision insecurity in certain situations. And that they are fully human participating in higher education with the entirety of their life. The latter is an important message the comes through the interview with Magda Ritoók, a pioneer of life and career counseling in Hungary, the mentor of succeeding generations of professionals and researchers. Her and the participants of the subsequent roundtable discussion that come either from career and counseling services at institutions, research or peer counseling projects of students, agree that shortage in financing is a common problem of any services provided to help students' life and career problems
HE institutions and students have a sense of false security that there is no need to prepare for problems or to compensate for any kind of deficits in the professional career and that any crisis is caused by weaknesses and inappropriateness. Reading the focus section of this issue the reader may develop an impression that student life and career counseling has a prepared and devoted circle of professionals in Hungary whose acquired expertise and fine tuned methods remain more or less unused. We hope that our journal may serve as a mediator for this accumulated expertise to find its audience and followers.
Paszkál Kiss
editor-in-chief
- 1. Előszó, tartalom
- 2. Foreword
