I’m in my last year of college and for some reason, I decided to design my own major, and I feel like I made a mistake, I’m looking at jobs RN and feel like no employer is going to understand it at all. And that I don’t really have much in demand skills? (FYI - it’s a BA in community development, so kinda like urban planning but more expansive, my major Combines Social Work, Business, and Sustainability)
In y’all experience, does a college major matter much in the long run?
No, unless you’re in engineering or medical you’re winding up a barista all the same.
Those counselors who told you you’d be a loser unless you went, go for anything it doesn’t matter all you need is a piece of paper, they lied.
If you’re lucky, you’ll get a job at a nonprofit organization, spending day in and day out trying to justify your paycheck. You’ll get paid pretty good, but it comes at a cost: there will always be an empty hole you can’t fill, one that is there because you’ll never know the deep in your soul joy of delivering anything of value to another person.
Then, maybe one day, you’ll become a manager and get to do some hiring, at which point you’ll haze the potential hires by requiring them to go through the credentialism rigmarole that you went to just to prevent yourself from accepting the fact that you wasted your youth, just to make them do it because you had to. You’ll become a cog in a machine that perpetrates the injustice you’ve suffered, the ridiculous system that requires young people to go into debt and spend their youth pretending to learn just to get a busywork job.
If you’re lucky.
Dude baristas do a very valuable job for society! Everyone enjoys a beautiful coffee. There’s no need for inner void.
OP, this is very dependent on your situation. I got a dumb bachelor’s degree, got a job in insurance because I had a degree of any sort, and did interesting work interpreting legacy contracts with a German degree. I was lucky in lots of ways, but most of my friends are in similar situations- the degree got their foot in the door, then they went from there.
Full disclosure, I left and am now getting a master’s degree in German, but at least I’m living here and have a concrete career plan following the completion of my degree now. I did however, make enough money in about 7 years at my company to fully support myself for the three year program, so it was still a help.
Edit: also, what? Nonprofits pay well, but don’t feed the soul? I’ve never heard that, though it describes insurance pretty accurately.