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I don’t think you need to do anything immediately, your situation sounds v stressful and disregulating though and I’m sorry you’re going through it
It might be good to slow down and remember all the things you bring to the table. I really believe that self taught knowledge/work experience isn’t lesser than knowledge gained in a classroom. I work in a field completely unrelated to my degree because people saw that I was eager to learn and they took a chance on me. You aren’t lesser because you have an associate’s degree - your path was just different! Don’t let your self critic diminish your dopeness 🫶🏻
There are also so many jobs outside of food/retail !! Trust 🙂‍↕️
Sep 5, 2024
Related Recs
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I don’t have any degree and in another life I worked in restaurants and at CVS. Customers would grill me about my career aspirations and straight up beg me to go to college. I got sick of it pretty quickly and sat down and asked myself what I would want in a workplace and what skills I had that I could use to do something else.
I had some freelance experience and used that to enter my current field and continued pursuing organic opportunities for growth and learning. About a year ago I started working at a company that prioritizes employee development and internal promotion and I’m in the process of gaining enough experience and connections to be able to do something new again! I definitely think it’s possible for people who don’t have a bachelor’s degree to find these opportunities; you just have to be strategic about it and get your foot in the door at the right places.
There are so many transferable skills you gain in retail and food service that are beneficial in other professional fields like communication, multi-tasking, attention to detail, etc. So you can take those and add them to whatever skills you may have gained at your current job.
Ask yourself what it is that you’re better at than anybody else, the things you would want and definitely not want in a workplace, the kind of tasks you like doing, and kind of guide your search from there. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re lesser than others just because you have less formalized education than they do and remember that people hire likable people they want to be around—even that will take you far! best of luck! 🍀
Sep 5, 2024
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long story short, capitalism is failing (which is for the best actually!) so a lot of the systems we were told to rely on are revealing the ways in which they are ultimately unsustainable. the erosion of the high school -> undergrad degree -> lifetime career and single-income stability pipeline is a very visible example of this. our system wants you to believe that GDP is the only measure of a thriving society, so you need to become the best tool for production that you possibly can be in order to keep this number going up in perpetuity. it's totally natural for you to feel some dissonance between what's expected of you in this kind of culture and what you actually want to do. this system was not designed with the needs of the individual in mind.
our current world does a great job of convincing us that we're worthless if we aren't economically productive, if we aren't "successful," and if we aren't head-over-heels about being a cog in a machine whose only purpose is generating shareholder value. luckily, you matter as an individual inherently, and you get to define for yourself what success is and what you want to accomplish with your life. a job is only a small part of all the things you will do if you keep curious and open to the world.
with college comes the freedom to act upon the agency which you have as a human with free will. adulthood is all about reclaiming this compass for yourself and shedding the inherited narratives and expectations that your upbringing gave you if they don't actually serve to bring about your own flourishing. use college as an opportunity to get to know yourself and work your way up mazlow's pyramid of needs (or more accurately, maslow’s sailboat); find community, find hobbies, find what brings you joy now that you have the freedoms afforded you by adulthood. figure out what it is that you most enjoy doing in life and find ways to pursue that, and it doesn't have to be tied to a career/your major (that's great if it is though, count yourself lucky if that is the case).
humans are too complex and capable to be restricted to performing one type of task in one single field for their entire life. sure that's what expertise necessitates, but you don't need to be an expert in everything. the economy is weird right now because corporations are convinced by the hallucination that people come out of college being complete experts in whichever field they studied, so it can be very discouraging to feel unwanted by the job market because you don't have enough "experience." this pressure is an unrealistic expectation, and it is natural to feel as if you do not meet this expectation. the system needs to change, not you! what corporate culture fails to realize is that learning about something is not the same as doing it, and experience comes from doing. college under capitalism is a business. it's not designed to provide you experience, it's designed to maintain a tuition-paying student body. you have to seek out experience yourself.
so try new things, fail on occasion, that's how you learn. don't limit yourself to doing only things which you perceive as being productive, productivity isn't what life is about. life is about experiencing. if something interests you, do it for the sake of your own edification. you'll be a fuller and more fulfilled person for doing so, even if it doesn't leave a blip on your resume. the best things in life aren't going to show up on your transcript or your linkedin page. your dreams do not have to be defined by your career, find a dream to pursue that is true to you and then achieve it. don't fall for the lie that your dreams must relate to your profession, and that your profession defines your worth. reject any narrative that seeks to belittle you for the sake of making you compliant within a system which was not designed to benefit you.
Sep 26, 2024
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I graduated with a degree that i def should’ve applied to grad school with - instead I went right into the workforce and hated where I ended up so I just started to upskill and build a modest portfolio of any kind of work I was skilled at to get a job.
I for sure hit up old friends from college to help me network and find something that fit and it’s paid off - you really do have to light a fire under your own ass and look at people in a very transactional light as far as giving you resources/time/opportunity and be hopeful and perhaps delusional enough for it to work
don’t treat this as a temporary thing, don’t get lost in the sause!
Mar 26, 2024
Top Recs from @sillygirltypebeat
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“who’s that voracious reader in the cool fit” - librarians probably
Jul 31, 2024
Mar 21, 2025
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This was going to be an anti-rec about not making out to Beach House with someone you’ve only known three weeks bc you’ll think of them every time you hear Beach House but then I realized that actually life is too short to not make out to Beach House
Apr 15, 2025