About a year ago I put a moratorium on applying for jobs.

I decided I was done with the job search. It’s a very dreary process that was causing me to have monthly crying fits and I was honestly tired of changing that one paragraph in my cover letters when I knew no one was even reading the first sentence. So I stopped. I unsubscribed to emails from LinkedIn and other job boards and I told my mom to stop sending me jobs she’d found through her own searches. (She was very hurt. She still brings it up.)

I settled for a crappy retail job that only paid me a couple dollars above minimum wage and accepted my fate as a retail slave. I figured one day when my boyfriend and I are married he’ll finally get rich and I can retire, so what’s a few more years in retail hell? But after only a few weeks I was already tired of fire and brimstone. So I did what any sensible person would do and considered applying for another retail position at a place that I believed would be more bearable than my employer at that time. (They were super unorganized if I’m being completely honest.) But I knew that I’d eventually start hating that one too, it was inevitable. I knew then and I know now that I won’t be satisfied until I find a career.

I’m done with jobs. I want a career in my chosen field. I don’t want hourly wages anymore. I WANT HEALTH INSURANCE!! (Btw, it’s entirely fucked up that health insurance is tied to employment.) I want to stop feeling like a failure amongst my friends and family. Not that they’re making me feel that way, it’s just my insecurities.

Now eventually, I did pick the job hunt back up. I even utilized the help of a career coach. Things were going alright but I never received any offers. Recruiters would reach out to me and at first that excited me but then I realized that they were just trying to fill a quota. After a few months of being ghosted by recruiters, hiring managers, and their ilk I again took a break.

I realized that the jobs I wanted didn’t want me due to a lack of experience. (I guess training isn’t a thing anymore.) This led me to return to school, again. Even though I already received my master’s I knew that program wasn’t right for me and I needed to study something I really enjoyed. In 2019 when I first started researching masters programs I stumbled upon the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. I unfortunately decided not to enroll in this program back then but now, after studying the curriculum and choosing media management as my concentration, I’m ready to begin this new saga that I call Grad School: The Sequel.

I’m confident that this program will give me the skills and knowledge to succeed as a social media manager or digital marketing manager, which is my ultimate career goal. I’m excited to finally become hireable and stop feeling an intense sense of dread when asked how the job search is going. And if this plan doesn’t work out I’ll just kill myself! Or go back to retail. Either way I end up in hell.