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There are so many different paths available to me right now, and I don't know which one to take.
I've just been offered a freelance/contract position with my former internship company. They liked me so much, they want me to come back and actually pay me this time. It's $20 an hour for a contract lasting a year. I could continue to do well at this company and potentially have a job right after graduation. The sacrifice would be working in an office environment I hate, doing work I don't particularly enjoy, in a city I despise. If I just took the contract and left after graduation, though, it would be an incredibly impressive resume piece, give me a paycheck, and be appealing to other companies even if I'm not applying for jobs that do the same sort of work. I'm going to be miserable in this contract, though, because I still hate the work and the environment. I don't know if misery now is worth potential job security in the future.
I also have my current job, which is part-time in the marketing department at my university. It's only slightly less miserable than my internship/contracting place, but it pays less than half of the contract. And I absolutely ******** hate the work I'm doing, though I kinda resigned myself to that, because I knew what this job was going in. My position technically ends when summer term does, though, but I've already been offered to keep this position into next year. I don't know if excelling here would lead to a post-grad job, but it's possible. Even if it did, there is no job in this department that I'd necessarily enjoy.
That seems to be a theme with these two so far: I want to work in advertising, yet the contract and this current job are strictly marketing/graphic design, which I hate. But that also presents another path I could follow: another internship with an actual ad agency for my final semester, to help get my foot in the door of the industry I'm actually studying to be part of. The possibility of this is actually less secure than the other two positions, because I don't know if I'll have a car for my final semester (so I wouldn't be able to go downtown to where every agency is located), and I don't know if I'm even competitive enough portfolio-wise to get an internship. This, right now, is both the ideal route but also the route with the most unknowns.
I've dropped my Women's Studies major to a minor because I can't handle the classwork in addition to everything else going on. But I could pick it back up, go to grad school, and stay within the familiar comfort of academia. Advertising grad school doesn't really exist, so I'd have to focus on Women's Studies. I might be passionate about it and perhaps even enjoy the jobs I could find at non-profits, but that's assuming I could even find a job in the first place in a related field. Plus my options for grad school are severely limited at this point, so there's a chance I'd stay at this school for several more years, and I'd rather get buried alive than stay here.
I could also... be a night-shift security guard. I could be a florist, or become a plumber's apprentice. Trash collector. Mail carrier. Funeral attendant. Truck driver. Low-level office manager who orders new staplers and hands out memos. Cutting lawns on a golf course. None of these positions would pay me anything more than the bare minimum wage I'd need to survive (except plumber, but it'd take me years to reach that point), but I don't think I'd be miserable doing any of them. They require no particular college schooling, just on-the-job training. Low-pressure work that I could leave at the office. Lots of downtime and/or little mental effort. I'd be expendable, but I'd also be able to quit and go somewhere else with relatively little fallout. Maybe I'm romanticizing these, I don't know. There are so many different service jobs out there. My dream job is lighthouse keeper, where I live by the sea and all I gotta do is turn on a light every night, but lighthouses like that don't exist any more. I think I would actually adore being a housewife, sans children. I just can't work in food service or customer-facing retail.
I'm even having trouble deciding what next immediate steps to take – I'm so overwhelmed with work that I can't keep up with my Ad Club duties, and I'm thinking I need to resign. But that closes me off from the few advertising industry connections I could form through my work in that club, and brings me another step away from advertising in general.
In both the Ad Club and my current job, if I leave that means I'm putting both the club and the university marketing department in a tough spot. We just had club elections at the end of last semester, and there were so few people that tried to get my job – in fact, the others who applied for it ended up getting other positions on the club board. There's no one else to do my job if I leave, or at least there's no one else to do it as well as I do. Same deal with my current job – I got it because they were both impressed by the professional quality of my design work and also because almost no one else applied; I overheard my boss talking about it the other day. They have so much trouble filling positions that almost no one applies for and most that do aren't even remotely qualified. So I feel the obligation to stay because of those reasons, as well.
And I've been so busy trying to decide which path will lead to the easiest future that I've realized I'm exactly where I was in high school. Exactly. I did band my junior and senior years because I felt like I needed to, like I was obligated to. There was no one else to take my leadership roles if I absconded, and I didn't have any other extracurriculars or life successes to take up space on my college applications, mostly because band was a full-time commitment and I was so far in at that point that starting over with another activity felt pointless. I was absolutely miserable because I thought that was the price to pay for getting into a good college; turns out the price to pay was actually about $40,000 more than I could afford, so my efforts were pretty worthless in the end and I went to a school I could have gotten into had I done no extracurriculars. I wasted 2 years and my mental & physical health to end up in the EXACT place I was working to avoid; I don't want to make that mistake again.
I'm running out of time to decide.... I need to give an answer by tomorrow for the contracting, and I only have a year left before I leave school. My parents aren't going to pay my rent after I graduate, so the clock is ticking. I want to move to Philadelphia, too, but I can't exactly do that if I don't have the money to do so. I'm afraid of becoming too entrenched in these marketing/graphic design endeavors because I dislike them and feel like it makes it harder for me to break into advertising the further I go.
I think part of me just hates work in general. Or maybe I just haven't found work I enjoy yet. I don't know. I keep telling myself that my suffering and all these anxiety attacks and time spent crying secretly in the bathroom at work are going to pay off in the end, but that wasn't true in high school, so why would it be true now? But what if I lose out on job security and a decent paycheck after graduation because I can't handle another year of this?
I wish I could be paid to lay in bed all day.
puffoon · Tue Jun 20, 2017 @ 07:14pm · 0 Comments |
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