For some backstory, I'm currently unemployed and living off my emergency fund, which will likely last around eight months barring some massive crisis. I'm hoping I find some work before then, shouldn't be too hard to get a job planting trees or washing dishes at least while I put some kind of plan together. Minimum wage in my state is $11, and I typically see $12-13.50 as a figure thrown around for the sort of work I'm qualified for.
I have a disability that costs me around $3k/year in medication costs. I can work most jobs. I'm living in an apartment with my fiancee and while I can still technically go back to college, I can't just make snap decisions or move across the US without making it a team decision.
I got pretty good grades in high school and made honor roll while working part time, so my folks really pushed college as the golden ticket out of poverty with the advice of "go to the most prestigious school you can get into and major in something easy that you like so you can get a diploma and then just go work in an office". I went to a university that was, at the time, one of the most selective and well known schools in our region. This has since changed, but most people have heard of it. I didn't really know what I was doing and just kind of took classes I liked and eventually had enough credits to graduate. Technically my degree was in Game Design, but really just because I had more credits in that than anything else.
Edit: I mostly took courses in ecology, tinkering with electronics, plant and soil sciences, and courses about designing puzzles and the whole user experience side of game design (computer games, board games, card games, etc). I don't have any programming experience outside editing my MySpace profile 15 years ago.
After college it took me over a year to find a job (mostly because my folks only wanted me to apply for certain types of jobs as a criteria for living with them) but I eventually moved out and found a job as a customer service guy at a big box store near where I live. I worked there for three years and just quit two weeks ago for a variety of reasons I'll go into if people want me to but it's mostly personal. Since then I've been applying for jobs pretty constantly but it seems that no matter where I'm applying and what kinds of jobs, they're all around the same pay rate ($12-13.50). I feel like because I have a degree and three years work experience I should be able to find something that pays more that what I'd be making out of high school, but maybe the job market works differently now.
What exactly am I missing or doing wrong?
Submitted March 24, 2018 at 03:36AM by _MalvineousHavershim https://ift.tt/2pB8PUG
