What are some skillsets that I can learn when I'm tired of applying to jobs to further increase the resume.

Regarding environmental science, I wouldn't recommend anybody letting their passion guide them. I devoted my entire life to becoming the best environmental scientist I could become, finishing a master's program with a 4.0 GPA, spending years working slave-wage-paying lab positions to prove that I was dedicated to the field, keeping well-versed in the field's trends, etc... and what happened... My professors treated with utter disregard at all points during my schooling (i.e. because I wasn't a Ph.D candidate) and I've enjoyed steady non-benefits-eligible unemployment since I left school in early 2013. Nowadays, I can't look back at any of my research projects, poster presentations, or textbooks without starting to feel sadness, regret, and disappointment. To be sure, I'm not even looking for a well-paying job or a lucrative career. I'd be interested in doing anything, so long as it supplies me with the money needed to keep buying enough lentils and rice to not starve. But nope...every attempt to get in is just an opportunity for some fuckhead professional to career-shame me and send me packing. I'll never have enough skills such as those in the above-posted checklist (which grows longer and becomes more prohibitively-expensive every year). I'll never have enough of that magical 'experience' that people assume is widely available before you get out of college (never mind that I was working in the field before I enrolled as a grad student...fuck that, that's not the right experience...). I'll never have get all the answers right on the 90-min pre-employment exam that people need to pass in order to be trusted to wash glassware.

On the whole, whether we're talking about academia or the private sector, the field is just another hidebound STEM ghetto, run by a gradually-shrinking number of proud careerists whose only real motivation is to protect their job security. There's no social component to any of it, even while the lot of them insist that they're trying to make the world a better place to live. That's all just petit-bourgeois lifestyle advertising. Almost none of the people really care about the environment, certainly not enough to actually more politically-involved, to actually find ways to create well-paying jobs in the field. Nope... That might actually require them to put their John Galt fantasies and American Dream bucket-lists on the back burner, and we know that's not going to happen.

So yeah....I'd personally not recommend the field to anyone with real passion or idealism, unless you're feeling very masochistic.

/r/environmental_science Thread Parent