Man has this made me real cynical about the value of education in employment, I basically fell hook line and sinker growing up for the common wisdom of NEEDING a college degree to do anything worthwhile in life, and I also come from a well-educated family of teachers and engineers further exacerbating the self inflicted pressure. But due to a variety of circumstances I'm nowhere close to where I guess I felt entitled to be at after all the time I spent nearly killing myself from mental health deterioration for 5 years total at universities. But it was all going to pay off when I finished right? I like to think I also put myself through it for the old school enlightenment purposes of university, but a larger part of it was definitely hoping it would result in being able to land a decent paying job(s) to fund a quiet, independent living and my hobbies. I didn't think I was asking for much.
I worked retail and restaurants part time through my undergraduate degree in Political Science which I finished in three years, then decided I'd go for a Master's in Public Administration right after that to avoid only having what some would consider a meme liberal arts degree with not very substantial work experience (the MPA program I went to requires a paid internship that the program helps you find).
I won't lie, my internship at a city government that will remain unnamed, was rough. Some of it was my fault, some was theirs. I felt an unreasonable amount of knowledge and finesse was demanded from a 21-year-old they're paying 12 bucks an hour to work half the week, to the point I had half a mind to remind my supervisors that I am a public admin intern, not an engineer, or an architect, or a building inspector. Sometimes it felt like my tasks were specifically chosen to exploit every hole in my skillset and/or psyche, and it poked at my social anxiety constantly when I needed help or didn't understand something that was spoken of as a given. I saw now why this particular municipal government was specifically listed (don't remember exactly where/how) as being the least recommended choice by my older peers in the program, but I foolishly thought little of it and took it anyway since they were the first to bite and I was paranoid about not landing an internship for some reason. Overall, this resulted in me dreading every day I had to go and spend there and my mentality was of just doing enough to stay above water. Things got better as time went on (spent about a year and a half there), but I got the sense my performance never really satisfied them. That, and this was a smaller town with an administration that was downsizing rather than expanding. One way or another, this was not a viable avenue for post-graduation employment.
The reason I elaborate so much on this bad internship is because to this day I can't shake the feeling that I've been blacklisted somehow from the area's city governments due to my time here seeing as I've had zero luck finding another city job and do not even get interview offers for positions I'm overqualified for and should have no problems landing, and of course better positions than that require muh experience. Fucking hell.
The job I finally landed post graduation as an energy broker thankfully has a much better work culture, learning environment and I get along pretty well with everyone. It's actually a fairly comfy job with the only issue being that the pay is dogshit and because they're a smaller company they're kind of stingy, and even slightly slimy about raises and commissions. For example, knowing that I'm about to become massively underemployed at the interview they tried to make the offer more appealing by promising a cut of the commissions for the tax refunds I would secure clients, only they then moved the goalpost on this to offering them to essentially subsidize my first raise when it wasn't as large as they first suggested to me. I didn't see a penny of commissions until over 6 months in and I had closed plenty of cases before then. I get them now, but it was still a really weird development that left me in doubt in the first months as to whether I was actually supposed to be getting these and asking for them or not. I'll be here for a year very soon and have stockpiled a good deal of money for a cheap townhome or something from moving back in with the folks recently, but I'm actively looking for work elsewhere and not giving an ounce more effort here than what they paid for, 38k a year. They have expressed satisfaction with how I'm doing though, which is surprising given that some days I just decide I'm only looking at my email for urgent matters and watching Youtube all day.
I could not imagine how things would have turned out for me if I was any less privileged or birth lottery lucky. The fam aren't millionaires by any means, but are the upper middle class Texas suburb type, that could cover me for tuition or even rent when it was needed, would never let me sink completely, and don't care if I move back in for a bit to save up (on the contrary, my mom doesn't want me to leave again).
How tf is anyone who truly only has themselves supposed to “make it”?