Academic and Career Advising of Scanners

Abstract

Scanners has become a common term for a recently identified category of people who find choosing just one interest or career path difficult (Sher, 2006). Academic and career advisors who work with scanners will likely find that these students have difficulty selecting an academic major or career path and that they seem to suffer anxiety and a palpable sense of loss with each attempt to make a final selection. We introduce the concept of scanners and describe a new self-report instrument called The Scanner Self Inventory (Bloom, 2009; Bloom & Tripp, 2011) that academic and career advisors can use to work with students who display unusual anxiety associated with major selection or career decision making.