Amy Than

Since high school, my career goals were all over the place. I dreaded the easily-procrastinated but inescapable trip to Microsoft Word for my first ever resume. As someone who has since made several honest resumes for jobs so starkly different from each other, accepting any job offer felt like an injustice to my future self. ‘As one door closes, another opens’, people say. But I’ve had my foot in many as five doors at a time at some point. I’d convince myself to jump through each one as they come and just hop trek back to one of my back-up career fields if I find myself unsatisfied… or bored. Other times, I get quite frustrated with the fact that I may be taking an unnecessarily long winded path to my ultimate, perfect job. Like this 5+ year Ph.D…

This is all to say that pursuing a career is as much of a methodical process as it is a chaotic choice.

Here are some conversations I have in queue with my friends’/acquaintances’ career path stories that you might want to hear:

• Exit Interviewing my boss
• Academic vs. Industry gap-year research experiences
• Why I turned down all my graduate school acceptances
• When all your friends are pre-med
• Going back to school at 30 for my bachelor’s degree
• This is where our timelines split and meet again: Being a teen mom
• Industry Vs. Academic research gap year before graduate school
• Ph.D.: Paused hoarded Debt