Like most of life's important decisions, choosing a career isn't easy or quick. Deciding what you want to do with the rest of your life is not something that should be done on a whim. You owe it to yourself to put some real time and effort into this decision. The fact that you have chosen to take the time to read this report is a sign that you are headed in the right direction.

The adults in your life are other good sources of information. Most adults have become good at something over the years and have built careers around that particular skill or area of knowledge. Pick their brains. Find out how they came to do what they do, what they like about it and where they would like to go with it in the future. You may be surprised at the wide variety of answers you get.

Are there any adults in your life whom you admire? People in some careers are naturally admired. Teachers can have a profound impact on young lives, for example. Physicians also have their cheering sections. And then there are emergency services personnel. Firefighters, paramedics and police officers are the people most commonly found in this role. All three respond to emergencies and help to keep them from getting worse. Firefighters and paramedics try to head off trouble before it starts, by encouraging the use of smoke detectors, for example. But police officers are undeniably in the forefront of stopping trouble before it starts.

Police officers constantly go on patrol, 24 hours a day in most cities, to make sure that people who are thinking about committing crimes know that they will be caught and punished if they do. This is known as "showing the flag,"or telling the bad guys who's the real boss in the neighborhood. This is also the backbone of policing technique. Cops look for trouble and hope they don't find it.

Make no mistake - cops are not universally loved. Certainly they are despised by criminals, but they are also thought of by many law-abiding folks as agents of oppression. Most such claims have little validity in the United States, although there is no debating the fact that police forces have been used for devious ends in many other countries. In this country, cops are generally respected and their service to the community valued, even by people who don't necessarily like them on a personal level.

Is this the right role for you? Nobody has ever suggested that being a police officer is easy. The hours can be long, and the work can range from tedious to dangerous to rewarding, and all in the same day. Nobody ever became a cop to get rich. Cops get medals and parades, and suffer from higher rates of suicide and divorce than people in most other professions. Ask most police officers and they'll tell you that they wouldn't want to be anything else, even on a bad day.