Feel free to move if this isn’t in the right forum…
Long story short, I’ve made a mess of my college career. It took me around 6 years to graduate with a BS in Psychology ( I took a few years off to work) and I decided I wanted to go into the medical field after getting injured on a job working construction. Well, now i’m learning that my sub-par gpa of 2.7 from years of partying won’t be good enough to get into even cheap local CC’s for Nursing…And i’m not even 100% sure I want to go down that route anyway.
I’ve always loved weather and never considered meteorology a career. But…Looking at that career path, i’d have to do another 3 years in school to complete that degree, and graduate to a job with very low pay (45k avg coming out of school). I feel like i’ve absolutely trashed my college career. I think of myself as an intelligent person, but my goodness i’ve been indecisive and now i’m 60k in debt unhappy with where i’m going and thinking that the career path that would make me happy might incur another 60 grand that would take me half my life to pay off.
You realistically cannot work full time and take classes along with paying off your tuition in this day and age. Courses have gotten insanely expensive. I roll my eyes when I hear my parents say "well why don’t you ever work and pay off your college bills? as if making 10.00 an hour barely working 30 hours a week is going to pay off a $7,000 tuition bill. All while trying to pay for your apartment, electricity, gas, food, cell phone, etc.
Maybe I should just settle with nursing so that I can actually make a little money to pay off my debts.
I’m 26 years old, think of myself as a happy person…but gosh it’s hard not to get depressed sometimes. Maybe this is the “quarter life crisis” everyone speaks of. I don’t really have any friends as they’ve all moved off and started their lives and feel like I never have any time to set up friendships because I’m always too busy trying to work or take classes.
Whatever job you are doing working 30 hours a week- you need a better job. Right now.
You need to table the idea of nursing, weather, anything else which involves more debt for a career you’re not even sure you want. You can’t afford more loans only to end up not liking whatever job you end up with- wondering if you should get a master’s degree to make you more employable.
So stop the madness. You need to get another roommate to split costs with; you need to get a full time job with fulltime hours. And then once you’ve got some solid debt repayment under your belt, you can afford to think about what you want to do with the rest of your life. But at age 26 you need a full time job right now.
Big hug. I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear.
Sorry, I’m with Blossom on this one. You need a full time job. You need to find a roommate and reduce your costs. You can’t buy your way to happiness with college degrees and being a perpetual student is not the answer. You don’t even know yet what you want to do. Do what you need to do NOW to find a full-time job and go from there. Figure out what INDUSTRY interests you…the BA/BS is OVER. You have that. If you figure out what industry you want to be in, then perhaps you’ll figure out if a Masters is in your future. Figure out the industry. Take an entry level job and see what you need to do, in the meantime get that full-time job…get some health insurance and get some savings in the bank.
I agree with the others. Get your resume in shape and start looking for better-paying work. It really is okay to do a job you don’t love for a few years until you figure out a better path for yourself. My first salaried job out of college was as a tech writer for a mutual fund transfer agency, a job I really disliked, but it paid my bills until I figured out what I really wanted to do.
If you do decide on nursing, remember that it is fiercely competitive because of the shortage of nursing instructors at every single nursing program in the country. A 2.7 GPA isn’t going to cut it, so you would need to take some additional science courses and ace them to prove that you could handle the work, even before applying.
I don’t know much about meteorology programs, but I imagine that they, too, are science-heavy.
^ tech writing, tech support, admin assistant jobs can help you get a foot in the door and start a career. I know several people with “unrelated” degrees who had great careers in IT. They self-trained or learned on the job.
With a degree in psychology, consider research-adjacent careers - market research, user research, media research, etc. One of the jobs I applied for in my job search was as a research assistant for The Weather Channel. Social science majors are good at collecting and analyzing and organizing large amounts of information and interpreting it in a way that comes across for people, and lots of these kinds of jobs look for social science majors.
Communications, advertising, PR are other fields you can consider.
Also, $45,000 is not “very low pay.” That’s actually on the high end for a recent college grad. Get realistic about salaries - coming out of college, unless you are an engineer, you will very likely make less than $50K a year for several years.