Hey all. I need a bit of help. Namely I need help finding short-term work.
Some background info:
- I recently graduated university with a B.Sc. in Computer Science with a focus on Data Science
- I have a B.Sc. in Physics from 2017 - my original intent was either academia or high school teaching, but I found both to be incredibly destructive to my mental health
- In June 2023 I will be beginning a 3 month internship as a gameplay programmer with Insomniac Games
- In the meantime, I need a source of income to actually survive til the internship starts
So I have 4.5 months until the internship starts. This is very exciting! I am incredibly excited! However, the time frame kinda sucks tbh! 4.5 months is not a lot of time to find a job, especially for me, let alone start work at a job.
Further complicating matters:
- I am a trans woman, which already makes me "undesirable"
- I am autistic, and the whole system of job hunting is extremely hostile to people like me (the autistic unemployment rate is apparently 85%???)
- I have severe anxiety and impostor syndrome. The idea of reaching out, applying to jobs, and especially trying to sell myself to potential employers is just... physically repulsive to me for some reason.
I don't know what to do here. I need a job. I have worked retail and food service in the past - both are sensory hell and so incredibly soul draining. I don't think I can go back to that. If I apply for jobs in my field, I'm gonna have to leave pretty quickly for my internship and that'll feel awful, and that's assuming I can get a job in time to work at it at all.
The best idea that comes to mind is freelance programming work. Problem there is I have no idea where I can go for freelance work that's trustworthy. I could try building my own brand... but I am full aware how much time and effort that takes, I'll be done with the internship before that sees success. The other option is an existing website to connect freelancers to jobs but I don't know which websites are trustworthy and safe.
In terms of what I've done in the past:
- For my capstone project, I was part of a team of 4 that developed a program which analyzes heartbeat data for wild birds from a noisy wireless low-power data transmitter. I was responsible for reverse engineering the encoding of the raw signal (we could not get in contact with the manufacturer of the transmitter), as well as developing and implementing the filtering algorithm to extract the heartbeat signal from the raw transmitted signal.
- I went through the JOS project from MIT as part of my Operating Systems II course.
- My previous job was at the OSUOSL, a non-profit group at Oregon State University which provides support and hosting for open-source projects. I primarily worked with Till Kamppeter on improving the OpenPrinting website.
- I also had an internship through the OSUOSL with OpenStack where I worked on migrating the OpenStack client to their new SDK.
- In the past I have tried (and failed, largely due to inexperience) to make fangames in Game Maker 7, C++, and Godot. Old people might recognize me as OniLink10/OniLink++ from MFGG.
I also have some experience with light video editing in kdenlive (see my Let's Plays on YouTube, the Zero Escape: 999 LP is my current one and my most complex in terms of editing).
If I could get any, any assistance at all, I would appreciate it so much ;;;; Even just pointing me in a direction to look...
