I know I’m not alone among my generation in feeling like I’ve suffered from a failure to launch. This may be cold comfort, knowing that many of my peers have faced the same obstacles to setting up a stable life after college, but it’s worth remembering when I feel crushed by the weight of my wasted potential. I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2017, feeling like by virtue of this alone the world should lay itself at my feet to be overcome as effortlessly as I’d conquered my college curriculum. But my easy academic life led me to assume adult life would support even more of the bad habits I’d built up during my trip through the school system. I made my fair share of mistakes in school, but the worst legacy from those days was a result of how many things I did right: I got the impression that success in a world made for average people would never require any real effort from me. It was the shock of a lifetime, therefore, finding out how much effort it takes to get ahead in what passes for the real world these days. (I exaggerate, but only just.)

I.

I started my first real job – at the original Cinnaholic, back when it was the only one – in my junior year of college. I’d done proofreading work for a family friend over the summer before, and I spent a few fruitless months begging alumni for money at the Cal Calling Center before I got demoralized and quit, but I hadn’t taken either of those jobs too seriously. Low on funds at the end of 2015, I applied on a whim to the bakery where I’d been a regular customer since freshman year, hoping to pick up a few shifts a week for some extra spending money while I was in school, and I was thrilled to learn that I would be hired a month before Christmas. The job started out simple enough, with me working the register and learning to prepare orders, but I took on more responsibilities with time, and within the first year I was able to make any of our products from scratch. The work was all easy enough once I’d gotten used to the routines of the store, and I proved to be one of the most reliable employees Cinnaholic had ever seen. That Christmas was my first chance to buy gifts with money that I felt like I had really earned, and while the gifts themselves were not great I saw it as an important step in growing up.

As my college courses became more demanding, the store became a place of refuge: making cookies, brownies, frosting, and cinnamon rolls was a welcome reprieve from academic work. There were times I felt like such trivial work was beneath my dignity, but I mostly resisted the temptation to see myself as too good for the job. After all, I never did the job perfectly and I was continually hungry for opportunities to learn new skills, especially when it came to dealing with customers. The bakery presented plenty of challenges, but I was motivated to put my whole heart and soul into that job by the sense of belonging I felt as part of the Cinnaholic team. Unlike at school, where I could pass with flying colors after failing to show up most of the semester, my simple job at the bakery let me play a vital role in something that the whole community loved. Ever since I’d discovered Cinnaholic in my freshman year it had been my favorite spot for celebrating with friends, unwinding after a grueling exam, or simply treating myself when I’d had a bad day, and it was profoundly satisfying to know that I could provide the same kind of experience for others.

School had been the dominant institution in my life for as long as I could remember, but the summer of 2016 was a turning point in how I viewed my responsibilities. I had been working half a year at Cinnaholic, and I was already indispensable, so I stayed in Berkeley to work most of that summer, taking on five shifts each week. With most of my classmates home for the summer, the bakery became the center of my social life, and I became more comfortable with my coworkers than with all but the closest of my friends at school. Maybe it’s thanks to those notes of arrogance I tried to keep muted in the back of my mind, feeling like my status as a Cal student was sufficient excuse for any eccentric behavior; or maybe my coworkers were just more easygoing, hadn’t been warped like I had by the demands of a pressure-cooker school. It was an easy summer, and I felt quite satisfied with myself watching my roommates come home exhausted from their programming internships each day.

It was difficult having to cut my hours and go back to school when my senior year started, but I had already done most of the necessary work for my degree, so the classes I took that year were largely based on my interests, and I felt much less pressure to excel now that I was on the home stretch. It’s a shame how much I disengaged from my school life that year, but few of my courses could compete with the level of engagement and meaning I felt at work. UC Berkeley, it seemed, could take or leave me as long as they could get tuition out of my parents, but I had only become more valuable at Cinnaholic and it was a real honor when I was trusted to train new coworkers. I still knew on some level that the work I did at school would count for more in the long run, but I was tired of giving my all to a system that only felt larger, colder, and more inhuman the further into it I advanced. Although my performance in school suffered as a result of my shift in mindset, I’d learned that I could be content with a lifestyle that wasn’t defined by the pursuit of academic achievement.

II.

When I finished college I was still enjoying my Cinnaholic job a great deal, but I had worked there almost three years, and I could feel parts of myself going numb from the routine. I needed a change of pace, but I was still unwilling to submit myself to the rigors of real-world work. I figured I could stay at the bakery while I looked for freelance work online, find work-from-home gigs writing copy or code, and transition smoothly into the kind of low-effort life for which school had prepared me. It was a comforting dream, but landing a gig online with no work history proved much harder than I had naively expected, and I became demoralized before too long. I started the first iteration of this blog shortly after graduation, hoping to build a portfolio of pieces to show off my skills, but I found myself to be a very slow writer without deadlines breathing down my neck, and setting my own deadlines was an exercise in self-tyranny that further undermined my ability to trust myself.

I had enough savings to last about a year, as long as the Cinnaholic money kept coming in, but I knew my wages there couldn’t support me forever. I’d moved into my own place for ill-thought-out reasons after graduation and although I’d had tremendous luck speculating on cryptocurrencies in the past year I was living well beyond my means. The unending search for freelance work required a level of motivation I was unable to summon, and I was still treating each day as if working at Cinnaholic were the only thing I had to do. Freelance work was lonely and fiercely competitive in a field where rejection was the norm even for those with some discernible talent. Bakery work was easy, secure, and provided a measured daily dose of social interaction – it felt so much more real than anything I could do sitting at a computer screen. The token amount of effort I was putting into finding work in my free time wasn’t enough, and I was starting to feel stuck at the bakery in a way that I hadn’t during my school days. I needed experience, but I found nobody willing to take a chance on someone with no experience.

Fortunately, that fall I was recruited by some old friends from school to help them start up a website. They had an ambitious vision for a project that could help a lot of people, and I found the work to be an exciting challenge, so this became my priority in my free time between shifts at Cinnaholic. None of us had taken on a project at this scale before, and I knew virtually nothing about web development going in, so I learned a huge amount from the work I did on this project. We had no shortage of big ideas or technical talent, but our lack of business experience left us struggling to market and monetize our ideas in a sustainable way. We tried to raise startup funds through a few different channels, but after a year with little success we decided to put the project on hold, focus on building our skills, and support ourselves through other work until we had more substantial experience. We have kept in touch and hope to return to the project as soon as we can, but in any case I gained valuable experience and learned a great deal that would help me in a more traditional job.

Working on the website with my friends boosted my confidence that I could find a good programming job, and that was where I focused my efforts after our team fell apart. I thought it would look good on my resume, showing that I could take initiative on an independent project and learn quickly with minimal supervision, but that was assuming I could get my resume read in the first place. I’m confident I spun this unique experience to my advantage in the few interviews I had, but I failed to consider the magnitude of the talent pool with which I was competing for entry-level programming jobs. My cognitive science degree required a few programming courses, and I took a few more than that, but programming was never my main focus in college. I had relished my lighter workload and the amount of fun non-technical material I got to learn compared to my roommates who’d studied computer science (not to mention the career fairs and hackathons I skipped because I didn’t want to do more work than I absolutely had to). But it first occurred to me while sending out resumes that I was putting myself up against computer science majors who had devoted four years of intense study to prepare for this career, and I had done nothing to make myself stand out.

I’d had little interest in programming before college, but I took to it so naturally in my first semester that I assumed it would be a fine career for me if I didn’t fall in love with anything else before graduation. I’d assumed once I got my degree that it would be my golden ticket to a job, but the struggle to find work and the difficulty of getting our website off the ground showed me that the degree was only the first step in proving myself. I got a couple of small jobs doing web projects for people I knew locally, but I couldn’t help looking green on my resume.

III.

When I made up my mind to quit Cinnaholic and focus on looking for work full-time, I asked a data scientist friend of mine to critique my resume. It was actually a relief to hear that my resume showed clearly that I didn’t know what I was doing. Given my lack of experience, I’d wanted my resume to show my willingness to learn and adapt to new responsibilities, so I emphasized the diversity of the jobs I’d taken on, both in and outside of college. My friend told me that a resume as long as mine probably wouldn’t get a second look from most hiring managers, and that I should pare it down to the experiences that were directly relevant to the job I wanted. This seemed like sound advice, and with a more focused resume I was able to get a few more interviews, but I still spent a few months between jobs, which I could hardly afford.

I had felt like I learned a lot about programming in college, until my friends and I tried building a website from the ground up. I wasn’t solving toy problems for class projects anymore, and software in the real world required so much more effort and attention that I became more pessimistic about my ability to succeed as a full-time programmer when that project failed to work out. I’d returned to the job search with another year of development in Python and web technologies under my belt, but without any official employment I had a hard time catching the eye of anyone who mattered.

It was over the summer, while sending out a flurry of resumes to tech companies I found online, that I got a call back from a company called Revature. I had never heard of this company, but they specialized in training entry-level programmers and connecting them with clients who needed their skills, which sounded like exactly what I needed to jump-start my career. I agreed to a remote interview, for which I had a week to study, and I was pleasantly surprised to find most of the material on their study guide had been covered extensively in my data structures course. Coming off a couple of years with little success, I was nervous leading up to the interview, but I worried much more than I needed too. The interview was easier than I’d expected, although the interviewer heard me nervously drumming my fingers on the table and several times accused me of looking up answers online, after which I tried to keep my hands on-camera. But I did well enough to be offered a job with Revature, and I was happy to have something to show for all my months of searching and applying.

Revature offered me ten weeks of full-time training at the University of Texas, Arlington, for which I would be paid $8/hr – minimum wage in Texas and half of what I’d been making at Cinnaholic. I was not excited about having to move and take such a steep pay cut, but since my prospects in the Bay Area weren’t nearly as good as I’d hoped, going with Revature seemed like my best bet. The program started on July 15, which gave me a few weeks to prepare, and it was amazing how having that one job offer boosted my motivation. It confirmed that I really could succeed in the job search if I tried hard enough at it, and it meant that unless I found some other job in California soon, I’d be packing my bags for Texas. I still had one interview and sent out a few more resumes with no response, so by the first week of July I’d made up my mind to follow through with the training program.

I had just moved into a room in Alameda, an island in San Francisco Bay near Oakland, and it was sad saying goodbye to the roommates I’d just started getting to know. At least I had some time to prepare, so I said goodbye to the friends I had left in the area, and they all wished me the best. I almost resented the level of confidence they had in me, my own confidence having been badly shaken by what I perceived as a lack of success in the past few years. I couldn’t stand the thought of returning home in defeat and having to admit to everyone that their confidence in me was misplaced. I knew my resume underrepresented the skills I could bring to a job when I really applied myself, but a series of disappointing applications had me feeling like I wasn’t cut out for a career in coding. I’d thought I had a natural talent for it, but maybe I was just bullshitting myself. I had a comfortable life in the Bay Area, with the token effort I put into the job search as my only source of stress, and I worried that I’d lost my ability to work hard altogether.

My friends and especially my parents did a lot to encourage me before I left, reminding me that I’d had a rich life full of experiences and challenges that had taught me a lot already, and they had no doubt I would rise to the occasion. I resisted the call to leave my old life behind, but I knew I’d hit a rough spot in my life, due in no small part to my own poor choices, and I needed some kind of change. As moving day drew closer and the shock of the whole thing wore off, I came to appreciate the opportunity for growth that Revature represented. The research I did suggested that training would be extremely rigorous, and I needed that kind of challenge in my life. Either I would prove that I had what it took to be a software developer, or I would find the limits of my capabilities and learn a great deal about myself in the process. As it turned out, I would end up doing both.

To be continued.