A little over a month ago, a terrible thought crossed my mind.
What if there was nothing out there that I actually enjoyed doing?
I had just come back from a trip to D.C. I had gone there for an alumni networking event, hoping to make a few new connections to land me a job. The month before, I’d graduated with my M.A. in Psychology. I’d been looking for work since February.
Sleep-deprived and one of the few MA graduates in a sea of undergrads, the event did not go well for me. I realized how much I would hate living in D.C., five hours away from my family. Furthermore, I just wasn’t that interested in the kind of jobs I was pursuing.
I found out soon after entering graduate school that academia wasn’t for me. I went through periods of denying it, but from the start I had no passion for the field of psychology. I loved doing research in undergrad, and enjoyed many parts of it in my masters’ program, but my B.A. psychology classes were a doggy paddle compared to diving head-first into academic journal articles. I convinced myself that I only hated course work and that I just needed to focus on my research and I could still attain the golden goal of a PhD. Certain moments I faced up to the fact that even colloquiums in my chosen research area exhausted me, and drafted plans for an exit strategy. I could go into applied research. Market research paid well and would allow me to use my six years of higher education.
Only these jobs were hard to come by, and I felt there was something missing from the jobs I did apply for.
So that’s when I reached what could have been a rather tragic impasse. I had spent my entire college career figuring out what I wanted to do. I’d eliminated a multitude of careers I knew I wouldn’t be any good at (or enjoy). If research wasn’t the answer, then what was?
I thought back to what I enjoyed the most about research. Besides being the first to find results on something, I loved learning new computer programs and building experiments. For my first-year graduate project, I’d spent hours learning how to use Inquisit, an experiment program that required writing out manual commands. The most interesting part of statistics class to me was learning to write syntax in SPSS.
Computer science had never occurred to me as a career option, despite how gifted everyone in family has always been with technology (including my late father, who was, in fact, a programmer). I didn’t like math, and I didn’t see how programming would help me achieve my vague, idealistic dreams of improving society.
Perhaps it just took me until now (and going through graduate school) to figure out what I really wanted was a stable job that paid well. With that, I could always donate time and money to the causes I care about. Unfortunately, to find a job I could enjoy required disregarding the education in which I’d invested thousands of dollars in student loans.
I decided to look into web development because of I knew I needed to try something new, because I’d taught myself HTML when I was 12, so who knows, maybe I could teach myself everything else, and because I am no longer afraid of failure. My graduate degree did not lead to the outcome I’d expected or hoped for but it did give me something. I know that I can fail and still be ok.
I did not “fail” at my graduate degree, but I faced many failures while in the program. For the first time in my life, I was truly challenged academically. I struggled to pull off the Bs I needed to graduate. In one class, I failed the midterm and had to work my ass off to ace the paper and final exam. I hated writing my major area paper (basically the literature review for the thesis) and its quality reflected this. One of my committee members verbally tore my paper apart. A few months later, at my thesis proposal, similar problems arose. I was frustrated and angry until I sat down and carefully, thoroughly reviewed the key papers pertaining to my topic. Suddenly, everything clicked. I dissected, elaborated, and extended my thesis proposal into an acceptable thesis. Months later at my defense, I rocked. I loved my work and my committee loved it too.
In the end, I persevered at something that made me miserable. Truth be told, it would not have been the end of the world if I hadn’t succeeded, either. Knowing this, I am no longer afraid of trying new things and paving a new path for myself.
June 13, I signed up for a Treehouse account and got down to learning HTML and CSS. Good news, ya’ll. I LOVE web development.
I have since started lessons with Thinkful, agreed to build a new website for a non-profit, learned to customize a WordPress theme, read a lot of developer blogs, and completed basic exercises in Javascript. I have so much left I plan to do and have barely scratched the surface of the giant, always-growing pile of information that is web development.
This blog will track my progress and hopefully provide helpful resources to others in my shoes. Welcome, and let’s get started.
You learned HTML when you were twelve?
I remember envying how much you said you loved academia and would fit in there as a professor someday. And I remember when that started changing in Grad school, when those strong second thoughts came around. It’s a shame we pay for years to learn something before we’re sure that we love it. I really don’t like it, and part of its our faults for committing before we can think it out or test it. But you made it out. You’re right about just having a job you can do, so you can do what matters to you once the money’s in your hands. As long as you’re not doing what you hate, it’s gotta be a weight off your shoulders not to have to find the job you love.
I’m glad you found something else.