Introduction. The problem is to study the cognitive components of the professional and personal self-determination of youth. The study is aimed at studying the psychological resources of students in the process of overcoming the difficulties of self-determination when choosing a place of residence after completion of education. Interconnected empirical indicators of the students' productive position are compared: semantics of the description of a city, distinguished on the basis of the essential characteristics of the city and certain layers of the urban community; features of the products of students' activities - social and cultural projects that they could offer to the residents of the city, realizing their professional position; a measure of subjective "pain" for students of the problem of choosing a place to live and work in the future.

Materials and methods. The methodological foundations of the study were the provisions on the interactive nature of students' professional and personal neoplasms and the provisions on the impact of developing educational situations on the quality of concepts that predetermine the semantics of the image of the world (L.S. Vygotsky, A.N. Leontiev). The main method was a psychological-pedagogical experiment consisting of pre-test diagnostics, developing elective classes for graduate students and post-test diagnostics. The empirical manifestations of the subjective position of the students of the experimental group (EG) were compared before and after the developmental course. The EG was attended by 26 students of the departments of "directing", as well as “recreation and tourism”. The diagnostic toolkit was the J. Kelly repertory grid method followed by factor analysis of the data, expert assessment of the products of students' activities (sociocultural projects) and the scaling method of “pain” for respondents to the problem of choosing a city for permanent residence.

Results. A set of empirical indicators of low levels of representation of the position of the subject of the urban community among students, not ready to consider themselves as a resource of positive changes in the city and influence such changes, is revealed. On the basis of the psychological and pedagogical experiment, the possibilities of changing the criteria are revealed, on the basis of which students evaluate the city and the changes in the assessment of the possibilities of their own influence on the positive state of the urban community. The characteristic of the content developmental elective for students, allowing to update and deepen the “image of the city”.

Discussion. The study obtained evidence that the concepts on the basis of which students construct the “image of the city” affect the quality of the products of their activities — the author’s sociocultural projects — influence the decisions about choosing a city as a territory of professional and vital self-realization. The psycho-pedagogical experiment made it possible to substantiate the provisions that the resource for overcoming difficulties in the self-determination of students when choosing a future place of residence can be support in orienting to the essential characteristics of the current state and development prospects of the city. The study confirms one of the fundamental propositions that images of perception predetermine the quality of activity products, even in situations of evaluating such a semantically complex social object as a city, at the same time complication, semantic differentiation of ideas about the image of a situation affects the complexity of the planned activity of the subject.

Conclusion. The study emphasized the presence of direct and inverse relationships between the peculiarity of the "semantic image of the city" and the quality of the professional ideas of students, presented in the form of socio-cultural projects. Accompa-nying students in the course of developmental classes on mastering

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