Fucking... god... I'm trying so hard not to cry at work right now...
I got a survey in my email from a club I was in during high school.
Here's my response to the last question.
Well, FIRST did steer me toward an engineering career field. I was enlisted to become a nuclear engineer for the navy. I was really looking forward to that, but it fell through when I got a medical discharge as soon as I hit boot camp. I really had no Plan B, for career OR education, so I ended up in kind of a bad place where I went from knowing the full course my life would take for the next twentyish years, to having literally zero plans for the future. I was able to eventually find some short term work, but nothing stable. After a while, I managed to convince a family member to pay for my college, and I went to a tech school for Accounting, which I had done well in during high school. It seemed the only thing I would be able to excel in. The same condition that caused my medical discharge caused me a great deal of difficulty in school until someone stepped in and forced me to see a doctor about medication. Since then, things have been better. I found my current job before completing school, and I've held it for about a year now, but it's really not sustainable. I literally work such a nonsensical shift schedule, my days aren't even 24 hours long any more. They're closer to 32 hours long, and my sleep is suffering immensely. I'll have to quit one of these days, before I die at 30. But I have to have another job before I can quit this one. I really wish I could just earn a living wage full time at this job, because I think I'm well suited to it, but I don't think my boss would be willing to do that. I'm the only person working here under 50 years old, and one of only two people that actually has the job because they need the money. Everyone here is bored retirees, and I think that gives the owner a warped sense of what their employees need in order to be happy... I want to continue on to higher education too, but I'm still really not comfortable with the idea of going back to school, so I've been putting it off... I also REALLY don't want to spend money on it, when I haven't really used my tech school certification yet to find a job, and I feel like it'd be wasteful. I also feel really guilty about the way I left my team. I was having such a good time until I volunteered to be the safety officer. Then everything turned into a job, and nobody would listen to me when I complained about safety issues, so I just stopped showing up one day. Nobody really called me up or checked on me to ask why I stopped coming, so I guess they didn't feel like they lost much when I left... Wow, I never thought I'd end up crying when I clicked through to do this survey.
I guess long story short, my education choices weren't what they should have been, my experience in the organization ended in a way that still guilts me heavily to this day, and my career plans are nebulous at best.