In the class of which this girl is a member, each girl is considering her future as this one is doing.  Each gathers all available data in regard to the vocation she is studying.  Her reports become a part of the class records.  She makes as full a report as possible as to the duties and responsibilities of the occupation, the schools or training classes that prepare for it, the length and cost of preparation, possibilities of employment, salaries paid, and other details.

Since training cannot alter fundamentals, but merely builds upon the girl’s nature and heredity, the same classifications obtain in the choice of the girl who can have training as in that of the girl who goes untrained to her vocation.  There are still the producers, the distributors, and those who serve; and it is still important that the girl should find a place in the right group.

The producers will include the designers, the interior decorators, the expert dietitians, the municipal inspectors of food and housing, rural consulting housekeepers, state or country canning-club agents, the women who organize and carry on model laundries, either cooeperative or otherwise, the managers of manufacturing enterprises, the farmers, the photographers, the artists, the journalists, and the authors.

The distributors are chiefly represented by the higher type of office workers, who are the “idea thinkers” of the business world, since they neither make nor handle products, but merely manipulate the symbols which stand for the products they seldom if ever see.  The women who manage buying and selling enterprises for themselves usually belong to the trained group.

The service group among trained women is a large one, including nurses, teachers, doctors’ and dentists’ assistants, various social workers, librarians, secretaries and other confidential office assistants, directors or “house mothers” in school and college dormitories and in institutions, dentists, physicians, lawyers, ministers.

Within the group there is wide range of choice, differing qualifications are necessary, and varying training is to be undertaken.  Girls, with the help of a vocational expert, should analyze their physical and mental qualities and habits, and should study somewhat exhaustively the vocation for which they seem to find themselves fitted.

“I should like to be a nurse, or a teacher, or a milliner, or the manager of a cafeteria” will not do, since those vocations presuppose some years of widely differing training.  Perhaps the girl will narrow the choice to nursing or teaching.  Then she must place over against each other the two professions—­special qualifications required, length and cost of training, personal obstacles to be overcome, and especially the demand and supply of nurses and teachers in her locality.  Upon these depends the girl’s chance to succeed when she is fitted and launched.

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  The children’s ward in a hospital.  The nurse must be resourceful and possess good judgment]