Polls: Education & Career

I am not anywhere near where I dreamed I’d be. When I was a freshman in college at 17, my dream was to be an aerospace engineer at Boeing and to be living in Seattle. Now, at almost 29, I’m a software engineer working at a startup and living in Austin.

One of my aerospace classmates, before I switched majors, had the dream to be working at NASA and living in Houston. They got everything they dreamed of and then some.

Did you achieve your dream or did you wind up taking a different path?

I see there are plenty of openings for low-skilled labor jobs, like fast food or convenience store clerk and crap like that. That is good for those who are in high school or college students, but for career-age people wanting to start families, those are shit jobs. Hate to say it, but it is true.

Meanwhile, the tech sector has taken a huge hit and even seasoned, experienced techies are struggling to land roles. It is becoming a nightmare out there for professionals to land upper-middle-class jobs. Yet, there are plenty of vacancies for near minimum wage jobs.

I feel leftists are killing the middle class and you will eventually either have the common wage workers or the elites, and that is it with hardly anything in between.

I am 30, and I have held over 25 jobs since I started working at age 15.

Looking at age 18 and beyond, I worked mostly in EMS between ages 20-22. I had a misdemeanor conviction during that time stemming from another state, ultimately losing my EMT license because of that.

While serving supervised probation for 3 years, I was on disability for severe mental health issues.

I started attempting to reenter the workforce at age 25 as a software engineer. While I have around 4 years in that industry, I have never held a job down in anything my entire life for a year or more. It is like 10 months here, 6 months there, and 4 months there... you see? What screwed me up was I was caught in a predator sting because I made stupid decisions out of desperation. I was never charged or convicted, but some of my past employers caught word and I lost 2 jobs over that.

Now, I am trying to regain momentum, but I just recently lost another tech job and struggling to land a new one.

I did community college for a short time and while it was fun, it was a major rip off.

College is for doctors, lawyers and people who need connections early in life.

My life would be so much easier if I had went to welding school or got into carpentry.

Still would have started a business.

When a student enters 9th grade, he or she sits down with a guidance counselor. They go over the student's grades, reading level, math scores, and interests. The counselor suggests college track or vocational track. If the student choose college prep, he or she has two years to show her or she can handle it. If grades are below a 2.5 GPA, they are put on vocational track.

Vocational track would teach a skill applicable to 21st century jobs, and schools would try to find apprenticeships for seniors. Now that may be limited in rural settings.

Right now IMHO, schools tend to put all students on a college prep track for at least the first two years of high school before the student is given a chance to take vocational education, and by that time, the student may have fallen behind and has to re-take classes.