2 years out of college. No professional experience outside of foodservice and retail. Need some advice and help digging myself out of the hole I dug myself into.

Hello there everyone:

It’s been two years out of college and I’ve been having trouble landing any jobs other than food service or retail despite going to what is supposedly a good college (supposedly a top 10 college in the region I live in) and getting a degree in the STEM field (Bachelors of Science in Mathematics). A lot of this might be my fault for not getting a single internship in college and lack of motivation caused by rejections and failure; some of it might be just things that aren’t meant to be; but to begin this post / autobiography / case study, let me walk you through my life history beginning from my freshman year of college to where I am now.

Freshman Year of College: Pollyanna

I begin my freshman year of college as a starry-eyed young adult deciding I wanted to be a math teacher right out the door because I enjoyed helping people realize their potentials and I wanted to make a difference in peoples’ lives. A bit before my first day of college, I signed some four-year promise with the university (I guess because people were taking longer than four years with their Bachelors Degrees and were unsatisfied with the amount of debt they came out with) promising them I’d take at least 15 credit hours per semester, maintain an above 3.0 GPA, not fail any class during my undergrad, and if it’d take any longer, the college would pay for the degree. Little did I know that signing that paper would be one of the anchors that would weigh me down later down the line. I would go on to take 15 credit hours in my first semester and do well enough to earn my first Dean’s List award. My second semester was 16 credit hours and within that semester, I started learning about teaching from shadowing. I did not bother finding an internship during the summer because I was sure I wanted to continue teaching. So far, so good.

Sophomore Year of College: Troubled Waters

When I went into my second year of college, I felt something was off about the college. It seemed like half the people I would see at school clubs and the following just up and left, likely due to the college quickly rising about $3000+ in cost per semester, going from a great value college to simply just being of average value. Regardless, I continued on with my learning. My first semester back to college saw me taking 15.5 credit hours and earning my second Dean’s List award. However, it took until my second semester in my sophomore year for some cracks to start showing. I took 16 credit hours my second semester and continued my learning about teaching by more shadowing and learning about best practices and lesson plans. However, the balance between what I was doing with the Mathematics section of my degree and the Education section was starting to overwhelm me. I even ended up failing one of my classes in Lifeguarding because I did not dedicate the time into learning the rules from the manual, erasing the four-year promise I had signed in my freshman year of college (I didn’t know it at the time, so I just continued trying to keep afloat by taking more than I could chew off). Anyways, I now had a dilemma on my hands. I ended up realizing that I enjoyed the mathematics section of my degree more than I did the Education section. In the end, not realizing yet that I had broken the four-year promise, I still kept moving on trying to be a math teacher anyways because I had fallen into sunk cost fallacy and if I wanted to change my Minor in Education to something else, I would have to take an extra year or two to change it. I didn’t want to get my parents into more debt than I already had them in, so I decided to keep course despite the warning flags starting to show up now. Once again, like last semester, I still wanted to teach, so no summer internship for me.

Junior Year of College: Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

Even with the rocky year that was my sophomore year, I went into my Junior year with hope that things would be better. Little did I know that my As I would usually get in my classes would start to turn into Bs and Cs with harder classes and I would almost reach my lowest mental points with some signs of mental burnout from taking off way too much more than I could chew, but still managing to get through the year unscathed. With my first semester of my third year of college, I would end up taking my most credit hours up to this point at 17. No Dean’s List this time though, as I would end up getting my first C+ within my major in Advanced Calculus. My second semester, however, would see me taking my most credit hours ever at 18 and would have some of my hardest classes and professors I would have to deal with. I would once again do the teacher shadowing and would learn how to do lesson plans. However, near the end of the semester, something different happened. The teacher I was in charge of shadowing pulled me aside and told me I should have been interacting with the students more and have had a more commanding presence during the semester rather than taking notes off to the side like I usually was. This should have been the breaking point that I should have just stopped with the teaching aspect and focused on something else to do with my minor. Once again, I fell into sunk cost fallacy and refused to do anything about it. This consistent indecision during my undergrad would later be paid back in kind to me later on during my senior year with the internship waiting for me in my grasp that would be a promise of a teaching job if I would have gotten out.

Senior Year of College: Bottom Falls Out

During the summer between my Junior and Senior years of college, I had almost completely forgotten about the teaching internship I had waiting for me during my first semester of my Senior year of college. It wasn’t until I checked my college emails that I had realized that I was supposed to meet with the teacher who would be my supervisor. He was abroad teaching students in Europe for June and July and it wouldn’t be until August that we would finally meet and get everything sorted out before my Senior year started. Already starting disastrous here. The disaster, however, would continue into my first semester of my final year with me barely keeping afloat with the three mathematics courses and three education courses (including the internship) totaling 16 credit hours for the whole semester. I would often not have the time nor the motivation to write lesson plans and would often be at the back of the classroom taking notes like my first three shadowing opportunities and would often have to improvise with what had been in the lesson book and what was on the projectors before class had started. I was barely sleeping (about 4 hours or less on average including naps during the day) and would often drive to the internship greatly sleep deprived. Halfway through the semester, the professor in charge of the internship would pull me into the office and would talk with me about my underperformance in the internship, telling me it would be cancelled if I couldn’t deal with the workload of the internship. I would still try my best with trying to do lesson plans and the like, but I simply couldn’t deal with the internship on top of all the classes I was taking, causing the internship for me this semester to be cancelled. The professor told me I would end up graduating with an Education minor degree (which pretty much should have been a Bachelor’s Degree) regardless of the Internship, but to get the credentials to teach (what really mattered), I would have to try again in the fall next year. Finally realizing that teaching isn’t for me, I eventually turned him down and took the Education degree. With an Education sized weight off my shoulders, I now had a lot questions to solve: What do I want to do with my life now? What can I do with just a Mathematics degree? Will a Mathematics Degree still be useful on its own? With the first semester coming to a close, I could have graduated then with both the Bachelors of Science in Mathematics and the Education minor then, but with so many questions looming on my mind, I tried to use what little time I had left in my second and final semester to answer those questions. Sadly, within that final semester, with looking at jobs like actuarial science and programming, I could not find an immediate answer, as those seemed to be too much work for me. I ended up coming out of this four-year journey bruised and battered with a 3.3-3.4 GPA and not valuing the degree(s) and accomplishments I got along the way (my parents to this day seem to value them more than I do), but still, I realized I had (and still have) an even longer journey ahead of me.

Post-College Journey: The Bleeding Continues

Like most students coming out of college, I felt slightly confident about my chances of finding a decent job that would finally give me some form of financial security. I mean, I had a STEM degree, people should / would be tripping over me to hire me like they said they would my first year of college! Sadly, I would quickly learn that wasn’t the case (especially where I am in the middle of flyover country), as I realized that without practical internships, my degree was useless and I would receive first round interviews and nothing more (doesn’t help that I’m not really good with interviews as a whole). I watched as I saw my classmates with similar degrees to me get accepted into positions at companies like KeyBank, Luxotica, NASA, USPS, etc. (They all seem to have had internships in the past). Meanwhile, I was stuck at home still trying to apply for various jobs in my state. About a month into the summer, I ended up settling and taking a tourist trap restaurant job somewhere within the state I live in just as a way to make extra cash and to buy myself time to think about the careers I could pursue. I would end up setting no expectations for myself and the job I was in and would usually work 8-10+ hour shifts with only a 30 minute break to eat, often working almost start-to-close and would often have to close the store at night while also helping out all around the restaurant. I would often come home from this job tired and not want to bother applying for more jobs as that would exhaust what little mental and physical room I had left when I got home. I would end up leaving the job about 6 months later without a backup plan in sight, something that I now realize was a bit of a mistake for later. Once off the restaurant job, I would continue off-and-on applying for positions in the hope of landing something related to my degree. I finally get a response back for a Data Analyst Internship position at a hospital, passed their test, and waited for a response for an interview in late February 2020. Then, in early March 2020, Covid happens. The internship position I had wanted just simply up and vanished and I had never heard a response back as the position had likely been cancelled by Covid. By then, what little confidence I had left of finding something I wanted to do just disappeared. I had just simply given up by then, not bothering to apply to anything, questioning the point of bothering trying to find the position with millions of people in the same position as I was, all the while all the unrest and Covid situations around the world wracked what was left of any sense of pleasure I could have experienced up to that point. After some bugging off and on by my parents to get a job (so they don’t have a daily reminder that their son’s a freeloader / basement dweller in their house) throughout the months of the early pandemic, I finally landed a position that I thought would be relaxing as a third shift stocker at a retail store a bit from my house. The job, while a lot easier on my feet than the food service job along with paying better, ended up being faster paced and more toxic than the food service job. I was often expected to do the jobs of two or three other people, could only offload one large pallet every two hours, was forced into a union which never stood up for me even once, and would often be reprimanded by managers who wanted me to pick up the pace when I already was working at my max speed. The job only lasted three months where my three-month contract I had apparently signed to during the beginning of the job was terminated. By the end of that job, I had decided I was done working in retail unless I would be in a situation where my finances are really desperate and I need a job to help pay off debts I have, bringing me to my situation now almost seven months later.

Conclusion

The only question I have now with all my past faults, embarrassments, traumas, and two years of not using my Mathematics degree is: Where do I go now? Clearly, even with all the applying I’m doing and all the changing around I’m doing with my resumé, it’s going nowhere and I’m feeling that day-by-day, the degree has piece-by-piece withered away in value. I’m feeling as if employers look at my resumé, see only retail and food service on it with no sort of internships on it, see that I haven’t been to college in two years, see that I’m connected to nobody in the company, and think “This person has no place here. He has no ambition or skills to stay at this company.” My parents are growing more and more agitated that I’m not bothering to find a job, turning down their recommendations to work at more retail jobs or amusement parks that are hurting for workers, even though those wouldn’t be resumé builders, and refusing to go to grad school as a result of it not being guaranteeing me a job when I get out and only guaranteeing me debt. The only things that motivate me to get out of bed in the evening and bring me any sense of happiness are leftover food in the fridge, checking my Youtube subscription box to watch videos, and browsing Reddit for the rest of the time I’m awake because I know at the end of the day that the only jobs posted on Indeed and the like are the leftover scraps that nobody wants because of low pay, toxic environments, or some mix of both and the only jobs that actually pay worth anything you have to get through connections, which I have none other than the two professors that helped me through college that I haven’t spoken to in two years. I often think to myself in this regard that “I know nobody; therefore, I am nobody.” Perhaps I should just ask some classmates I have only spoken to for two minutes in class on LinkedIn if they have any jobs available at their companies I would be applicable for. Perhaps I should seek psychotherapy after going through multiple periods of mental burnout throughout college and up until now. I honestly don’t know. Let me know your comments and suggestions on my situation and perhaps I’ll try to take what you guys can give me. Thanks for any suggestions any of you may have.

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