If this comment seems a bit rant-y, I’m sorry! Please don’t bother reading it if you aren’t in the mood to read a rant. Writing this helped me clear my head and feel better about myself. There’s something therapeutic about writing, sometimes; consider this as two parts EA journal, and one part invitation to give me advice.
I have an ugh field regarding applying for jobs (although I suppose that maybe it doesn’t officially count as an ugh field anymore, now that I’m aware of it). I’m generally able to work myself up to applying to a job or internship when I have enough time to—at its worst, the process generally involves me taking 1-2 hours to think about how unintelligent and useless I am, after which I am able to sit down and go through the process of actually applying to the position in question.
I am in a position where I could either do a summer internship and then go to graduate school, or go directly into the workforce. If I don’t end up with any good job offers in industry, I’ll just default to going to grad school in STEM (I know which field within STEM I’d be going to grad school in, but I don’t want to mention it here, as I’d like to remain as anonymous as possible for now).
My feelings about what type of career I’d like to have have been affected by my inability to believe in myself; I could see myself taking a worse job than I would otherwise be able to obtain in order to done with the stressful process of searching for jobs.
I’m not at all passionate about my STEM field—I only majored in STEM because I wanted to make enough to be able to both live comfortably and have enough wealth to donate to EA causes. Actually, I would have been fine with being a starving artist type, since the fun-ness of doing humanities work would have made up for the relatively lower salary I would have made if I had majored in a humanities field. Majoring in a STEM field will probably allow me to donate more to EA organizations than I would have been able to otherwise, so that’s a plus.
Also, I’m not sure how to tie this in, but: the parent I lived with while growing up was very successful professionally, and this makes me feel far more uncomfortable than I would otherwise be about not being more talented than I am. They never accorded me much status, and (at least in part due to my desire to please them) I ended up taking their terrible advice not to go into computer science, which, in retrospect, seems to me to have a somewhat higher reward-to-effort-spent payoff than some of the other sciences. I don’t particularly care for CS any more or less than I care for other STEM subjects; it’s just that the payoff for studying CS is higher. Oh well.
Thanks for reading :)
Giles, Ruthie, and Tom,
Thank you all for the encouragement and advice. Yay! :)