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In contemporary societies, adolescents' individuation is largely staged within the educational system, and is defined by several schooling options. This is particularly true when young people reach upper secondary education, as this transition implies the definition of a personal project. In the Portuguese context, authenticity is linked to the ‘obligation’ of choosing – by means of a compulsory vocational choice. To define a personal project that gives studies a meaning becomes a problem pupils have to deal with. Supported on empirical data based on in‐depth interviews to pupils attending 10th and 12th years of upper secondary education in Portuguese public schools, this article discusses some of these issues. Specially, we intend to explore pupils' obligation to exhibit their autonomy by choosing a school path with the awareness of risks that may emerge along with their options.

A obrigação de frequentar a escola, por um período de tempo cada vez maior, transformou a escolarização numa dimensão crucial da construção biográfica. A transição para o ensino secundário revela-se, neste aspeto, um momento particularmente crítico, uma vez que o jovem é convidado a definir um projeto (de futuro), através duma escolha de via escolar. Ora, ocorrendo numa etapa da vida — a adolescência — caracterizada pela adesão a uma ética de exploração, esta projeção no futuro pode levar a uma tensão entre ritmos biográficos (baseados na exploração) de construção de si e calendários institucionais (baseados na obrigação de escolher) impostos pelo sistema de ensino. Neste artigo, propomos um modelo de trajetórias escolares no ensino secundário que leva em conta tais tensões.

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Within an already completed project on vocational choices made by students entering secondary education in Portugal, a finding has deserved our particular attention: the renunciation of influence, that is, the belief that the choice made was free from any kind of influence, which emerged as a common value shared by all the young people surveyed. Based on our quantitative data (a questionnaire survey with 1,793 secondary school students) and qualitative data (24 individual semi-structured interviews with students at the same level of education), collected under this project, this article seeks to (re)frame the denial of external influences on the school trajectory definition in the context of building the self in adolescence. We will do this by comparing the autonomy claimed by adolescents with the sources of influence that participate and support that choice. Therefore, throughout the article, we will identify who the interlocutors of students in the process of (re)defining their vocations are, which information media they resort to to support their choices and which degree of importance is attributed to such sources of information. The data presented allows us to better understand the complexity of the processes of individuation in adolescence, by framing the legitimate discourse of self-affirmation in the dense web of social relations in which it takes place, highlighting the unique role played by the school world, family and by the media.