I fell for the "major in what you're good at/passionate about" meme and graduated with a useless bachelors degree with...

I fell for the "major in what you're good at/passionate about" meme and graduated with a useless bachelors degree with the interest in getting professional work in museums last year. I'm realizing the grave error I've made because no museum will take someone fresh out of college and trust them with anything, so I'm stuck working my 35/hr a week, $10.50 an hour grocery store job while I live at home weigh my options. Luckily I have no debt because my parents set me up a college fund when I was born but I feel like such a fucking failure because I threw it away on something useless.

I'm considering moving up to the corporate department of the grocery store I'm working at or moving to Texas to be a border security agent with the intention of garnering investigative experience to hopefully move up to better government agency work.

Any advice for this or should I just kill myself now?

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The way into professional positions is unfortunately never straightforward- you usually won't just get hired into a professional job straight out of college regardless of what your major is. Even people with STEM degrees generally do some sort of postbac work, internship, co-op, or other trial employment before they get a real job.

The reason for this is that pretty much all industries work through personal connections. If you don't already have a personal connection of some sort that you can leverage into a job, you need to find a professional opportunity that will allow you to meet people in the field you're interested in.

If you are really passionate about museum work, you should make personal connections at a museum you'd like to work out. Look into volunteer and internship opportunities- these can often be leveraged into actual jobs once you know the people who do the hiring and they already know you do good work. If you're interested in serious curatorial or scholarly work you will probably need a masters or PhD, so look into those as well if you had strong undergrad academic performance. Many of the highest ranked graduate programs are funded, so you'll get paid to go to school and teach/research instead of having to pay.

>Many of the highest ranked graduate programs are funded, so you'll get paid to go to school and teach/research instead of having to pay.

I thought about going to grad school but I have no idea how it works. How do you get into a program like that, where do you even start to look? Plus I'd probably have to move for such a thing and the thought of investing so much time and money into a Masters that might not even go anywhere sounds like such a terrifying risk, especially with how wasted my years at college feel right now. I suppose you're right about connections though. The most I've done is intern for an upper-class auction gallery and really enjoyed and did a good job at, but there really weren't any connections to be had and they didn't want to hire me.

And I fell for the "do what will make you money but you're not good at" meme and struggle every day to keep completing the tasks without my brain wanting to escape my skull. I'm constantly working harder just to scrape for answers and on the verge of vomiting and shitting myself every morning.

When I get home to use my money, I break down about the stress of tomorrow and do nothing but drink and shitpost.

It's not better on the other side man, if you're actually good at this shit, keep trying, and the cream will rise to the top. Every kid I hire is way more passionate for their job than their paycheck. You'll get your chance.

I would start by looking into the top programs nationwide for what you are interested in, these are the ones that are likely to be funded. One thing you should realize though: graduate school programs like these are not so much school as they are jobs. In a doctoral program, you take a few classes your first year or two, but the rest of your time is spent on original research, and you are paid a salary for this and/or teaching. Generally grad school funding pays enough to get by (though without saving up a lot), so you shouldn't think of it as a money sink- just a few years of getting paid only 25-35k/year. It does require uprooting and going somewhere new, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you are already considering up and moving to another state already.

BTW my source is that I just finished my PhD. It is in physics, not museum science or anything, but a lot of my friends are/were in humanities programs. They work pretty much the same except that funding can be a little harder to come by.

Well, when put that way it does sound relatively safe, I'm only making $19k a year anyway. I guess my huge fear is that I invest a lot of time and money in something that gets me either nowhere or puts me in a worse position than I started off, but the only real way to find out is if I look into it. Out of curiosity, what was your Master's program like?

I did a PhD, not a master's. Generally you do get a master's about 1 or 2 years into a PhD program without having to do any extra work, so technically I have one, but this is only relevant to people who drop out of a PhD program with finishing. This way, if you have to quit after 4 years of work on a doctorate, you aren't empty handed.

From what I understand, it is more common (but not necessary) to seek a masters degree in humanities before pursuing a PhD. I also know that some humanities master's programs work as feeder programs for funded PhD programs, so that could be a good option if you're not sure yet. If you want advice about this, I'd maybe reach out to one of your professors from college or someone you know from one of your internships who has gone to grad school and see what the typical educational path is in the field you're interested in.

To be clear: it is more common in humanities than it is in science to seek a masters before a doctorate. I don't know about the absolute frequency at which applicants to humanities PhD programs already have advanced degrees; in science it's maybe 5%, I'd guess it's a bit higher in humanities.

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