meow_d

For myself, I am a supervisor at a third party quality control company in the automotive sector. I both lead teams that sort and inspect various parts of automobiles, as well as do the work myself. I have a degree in computer networking, but by the time I graduated, I found that I really didn't want to work in that field.... Got to blame the late 2000s tech bubble for that. I much prefer working in this field anyways.

I'm a marine scientist working for a state-funded lab. I'm actually out on a fishing boat right now wrapping up a 10(ish)-day scallop survey with the rest of the lab. Been doing marine science stuff since I left undergrad, and got my MS before I got this job. I've only been in fisheries since 2023 but if you got marine science questions I can do my best to answer them. Hell, I'm even trans if you've got questions about that.

You mentioned the Philippines, are you by any chance living there currently? I live there and the career prospects there are quite different than in the States - just curious about your situation.

note: for anyone reading this feel free to add stuff in the comments or dm me on discord :D

I'm a control systems engineer in the metals industry, at least on paper -- I actually mostly do a bunch of hazy IT crap supporting the plant systems that the official IT department can't or won't do. I'm in the states -- the money is great, the hours are awful, and the entire field is overwhelmingly old, male, and kinda dickish. I got a degree in math & CS as well as engineering but I kinda looked at the tech sector and figured that manufacturing/heavy industry was a more stable sector to work in. The primary way we make money is operating huge, complex, town-sized pieces of machinery to do extremely complicated physical chemistry, 50 tons at a time, and getting it right the first time, but all the institutional knowledge walked out the door when management purged the internal engineering departments in favor of outsourcing in the early 2000s, so we desperately need subject librarians and techno-archeologists but management doesn't (yet?) realize that, so the demand is completely unfulfilled.

White-collar jobs can be shitty, but generally beat the pants off anything where your work productivity is tied to your ability to do manual labor. A 40-hour office workweek is at least 50% slacking off while looking busy -- it's not ideal but it's a big improvement over having to actually work 40 hours.

gameplay programmer :3

So I work as a software engineer (contractor) for a small government lab (usgs). Some of my work is fairly straightforward 'develop software to manage a database of user and automated input' stuff, designed to run a web service for users at the lab to store information about the hardware they work with, and a number of tools I'm the primary maintainer of that are more focused on specific math and science applications -- parsing specific kinds of data files, signal processing, etc. that's a bit more tied to my background in physics and mathematics. Which is probably where actually getting into how I got into this would help explain things.

I was in college studying physics during the 2008 collapse. I'm class of 2011 and was studying physics and was neither particularly apt for it in the end (geometry and I don't always get along) nor enjoying it terribly, and found myself more interested in the computer side of things. Both in computational modeling and just programming in general. A lot of the math was related (algorithmic analysis came quite easily from my physics background) but overall easier, and the ability to use a computer to solve problems always beats trying to do stuff by hand.

Between the tenuous job market, a lack of confidence in the skills I developed in my major, and wanting to actually do more computer stuff, I decided to move on to grad school. I picked a location with a good grad program in computer science close to where my family was now, and picked up a number of good skills from it. Being in grad school means student loan interest was deferred, and so I didn't have to worry about being buried in payments after the fact. I still have loan debt, but outside of the program and with a job it is manageable.

My interests were in AI research / machine learning and algorithmic analysis / theory. Being skilled at the latter from undergrad got me a student research position with the theory department doing work that was related to cryptography for US DOD purposes. I've spoken on this before, but I found myself low in passion for the project, and that and what is probably undiagnosed ADHD made any sort of self-motivated study basically impossible. I eventually left, not with the PhD as I had planned, but enough coursework for a masters.

While filling out applications for various jobs, some of which were more appealing than others (the specter of the DOD looms large over my fields of expertise), I received an email from one of the department secretaries about an position being open at this lab, and applied. I did well enough at the interview programming challenge that I got the job, and have been working there since 2016.

To the degree that I think there are lessons to be taken from this, it's that knowing that you've been at university and are about to graduate, you have at least some leverage on the university, in that they want to be able to point to their graduates getting jobs after the fact to prospective new students, so there will probably be people in your department or the general services that you can (and probably should!) talk to about finding possible job openings and helping facilitate resume placement and interviews. Getting you a job helps make them look good, and if their goal is to turn out young adults qualified to specific kinds of jobs it's also a good place for potential employers to put out feelers for new hires.