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Today I did something I should have done a long time ago. I quit. Lunchtime came, and I didn't come back. Now, mind you, this job is retail shitsville, so it's not like I walked out of the spreadsheet mines or something, but still. My mental health has been suffering for years, and being the do-everything-guy at a grocery store wasn't helping. I was primarily a cashier, at least on paper. In reality, I was a cashier, a supervisor, an IT technician, a dock worker, a maintenence tech... basically, anything they could throw at me I picked up and bashed into an output. No task was too great or too complex or truly beyond my expertise. The variety was nice, but it always came back to needing to please unpleasable customers with subpar equipment from a corporate culture that was out of touch with their "boots on the ground." This translates into a 28 year old with a B.A. in Economics, a terrible smoking habit, and some salacious text messages with alcoholism. I've been telling myself I need to commit to finding a new job, but every time I get home I'm too exhausted from work to do anything but lay in my depression hovel, and my days off are spent numbing myself with video games and cheap beer. So now what? Well, I've achieved one of the goals I set with my therapist: find more time to focus on starting and building my career. Part of the reason I found the courage to pull the trigger is that I already have a lead with a staffing agency that specializes in people like me. My problem is that I'm qualified, but I don't know what I'm qualified for. I have a Bachelors degree in economics, with additional coursework in statistics and probability. I've been hunting on and off since graduating a year ago, but I always get discouraged. I can never figure out what to search for. Online search engines want me to search by job title or company, but I don't have a specific company in mind, and I have no idea what job titles correspond with what I can do. At the end of the day, I want to be doing 'research.' I want people to ask me a question, and be responsible for providing them an answer to that question using statistics, probability, and economic theory. The subject matter is less important than the "how" of it, as I'm comfortable educating myself on things I know little about, though I would prefer to be working closer to the public sector or economic development than not. I have experience using programs like STATA to perform data analysis, and while my math grades were fairly poor, I enjoyed the work in my statistics and probability math classes, and have taken away a desire to learn more. What helps me with the analysis arm is knowing enough about programming and scripting to feel comfortable with analysis suites like STATA. I have no doubt that I could pick up something like SPSS or whatever analytics software an employer uses fairly quickly. So, Bitcoiners, what I am hoping you can do is help me figure out what the hell I should be looking for. I essentially know what I want to do, but I don't know what that thing is called, don't know what I need to do to sell that I actually CAN do the thing, and I don't know who I should be telling all this poo poo to. tl;dr: I walked out on my job, but don't know how to search for jobs because I don't know what I'm qualified for with a B.A. in Economics, some math background, and lots of problem solving skills.
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Aug 12, 2018 21:41
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Sounds like some kind of consultant job.
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Aug 13, 2018 00:43
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There is no "general research" job, at least not one that is attainable for most people without an advanced degree and very good connections in big cities. Think tank writer, journalist, and librarian are the closest jobs I can think of, all with very few slots and many applicants right now. Or maybe figure out something you want to specialize in, with econ it should be easy to find some business analyst/business development/market research type job where you could use some numbers.
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Aug 13, 2018 00:46
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Maybe try working at a bank, using your past experience in retail and your "people skills" to get an entry level bank teller gig sounds like it'd fit. You're going to find it hard switching from a retail to another industry without some work history/experience to lean on.
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Aug 13, 2018 07:29
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Pryor on Fire posted:There is no "general research" job, at least not one that is attainable for most people without an advanced degree and very good connections in big cities. Think tank writer, journalist, and librarian are the closest jobs I can think of, all with very few slots and many applicants right now. "Think tank writer" is the ultimate goal. I interned for a think tank a few years back and loved what I was doing. There are two groups in my area that I'd really consider for this, and I'm planning to give one of them a call today, based on what a colleague from the first mentioned. I've already applied there once, but nothing seemed to come of it, but I want to pick the brain of the person behind the job posting and see if he can give me some advice going forward. Said former colleague vouched for the guy when I was asking about what this place did. Slayerjerman posted:Maybe try working at a bank, using your past experience in retail and your "people skills" to get an entry level bank teller gig sounds like it'd fit. You're going to find it hard switching from a retail to another industry without some work history/experience to lean on. This is the most daunting thing I've found. Since I'm starting my career relatively late, I don't have the 3-5 years a lot of positions that interest me seem to want. This is one of the reasons I'm not picky about what industry I go into. If it fits the low bar of "professional working with data," at the very least it adds experience outside of retail for more lucrative/interesting positions down the road.
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Aug 13, 2018 13:07
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Policy sounds potentially feasible, given your analysis skills. Hmm. I have the reputation as the rear end in a top hat here in BFC forums, so I guess I will ask this outright. What is wrong with you? If you tell us upfront, people can give advice to work around it. A degree in economics, with considerable analysis work, isn't the usual laughable for-profits degree in basket weaving we see around here. So, how come you ended up with retail full-time? Drug habit? Issue with authority? What? You graduated after the depth of the recession, so I assume it is something specific to you.
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Aug 13, 2018 14:42
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There's not necessarily anything wrong with him aside from the fact that he he's trying to fill out forms on a website or search for random job postings by job title, there is a 0% chance of getting a think tank writer job using that strategy. The point is you need to know people and move in those circles, they don't use craigslist or ziprecruiter or whatever for such highly coveted jobs.
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Aug 14, 2018 17:58
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Also most job sites let you search by keyword too, so you can look based on one of your skills or the technologies you've used.
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Aug 14, 2018 18:19
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Search for Analyst positions? Business Analyst or Data Analyst
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Aug 14, 2018 19:11
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You're going to need to put together a portfolio and sharpen up your skills right now -- experience without being able to back it up is meaningless. Put together a few projects demonstrating your ability to do what you claim to be able to. Make sure these are projects that people can download and see that you are not bullshitting them. Spend some time working on your resume. Get on LinkedIn and start building connections. Go to MeetUps in your area. Go to career fairs offered by your college. You need to be very proactive about this. It's much more difficult to find work if you're unemployed, and you have a countdown until you're broke and homeless, unless you have help or money stashed away. You're really going to need to get out of your comfort zone with this one, because you'll be competing with new college graduates whose skills are more fresh than yours.
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Aug 14, 2018 19:32
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the market for business analysts and such is really thin so you should be able to do that without issue
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Aug 14, 2018 21:21
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John Smith posted:Policy sounds potentially feasible, given your analysis skills. Pretty much what I outlined in my OP. A few more details is that I spent roughly 7 years getting my degree, in and out of school. My first four years were wasted because I was pretty aimless on what to do. Two years after that I spent in the labor force, doing food service work, before returning to school and finishing over the next three years. A good bit of my wasted time can be chalked up to bad advice from people who told me to do what I was already good at, because computer science was "lucrative." I stayed focused on IT for too long, and it ended up costing me lots of time and money for something that ultimately I could have gotten on my own, and is little more than a tertiary trait to what I ultimately want to do. (Read: knowing surface level programming is useful for an analyst because it makes me very comfortable working in scripting environments, and troubleshooting my own problems.) Taking so long to finish, and only having one internship in my field along the way, left me with too much experience in retail and not enough in a professional environment. Add to that being generally clueless about finding resume builder jobs, along with mental illness that leaves me feeling like I got worked over with a sack of hammers after a day of subsistence work, and I never really ended up devoting myself enough to that hunt where I could find any kind of success. The internship fell into my lap, really, since I was working with a career counselor at the community college who knew a guy who worked at a think tank and that got me an in. Tomorrow I have an interview that came to me roughly the same way: a headhunter for a staffing agency found my website, and she connected me with a company that is putting together a market research team. In other words, all of my success so far has been through networking. What I'm afraid of is that, aside from this break, my network is non-existent in the field I want to be in. Which is neatly summed up in the next post: Pryor on Fire posted:There's not necessarily anything wrong with him aside from the fact that he he's trying to fill out forms on a website or search for random job postings by job title, there is a 0% chance of getting a think tank writer job using that strategy. I'm completely unsure of how to do this. Jecht posted:You're going to need to put together a portfolio and sharpen up your skills right now -- experience without being able to back it up is meaningless. I have two projects from school that I default to here. The first is my undergraduate thesis, which was a project looking at how the amount of spending on direct social transfers in a set of OEDC states affected GDP growth. The second is a paper for behavioral economics that was ostensibly a "here's what I learned" paper, but I was working fairly closely with the professor, and he gave me leeway to spend more time talking about specifying regression estimators, which I used to talk about how to estimate the level of "trust" in a society based on how homogeneous that society is. Do I need to host these somewhere? Should I be sending them off with my resume? I use the abstract for my thesis paper as a "project" description on there.
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Aug 16, 2018 02:45
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Warmachine posted:Pretty much what I outlined in my OP. A few more details is that I spent roughly 7 years getting my degree, in and out of school. My first four years were wasted because I was pretty aimless on what to do. Two years after that I spent in the labor force, doing food service work, before returning to school and finishing over the next three years. A good bit of my wasted time can be chalked up to bad advice from people who told me to do what I was already good at, because computer science was "lucrative." I stayed focused on IT for too long, and it ended up costing me lots of time and money for something that ultimately I could have gotten on my own, and is little more than a tertiary trait to what I ultimately want to do. (Read: knowing surface level programming is useful for an analyst because it makes me very comfortable working in scripting environments, and troubleshooting my own problems.) (1) Motivation. Can't help you there. Either you wanna shape up or you don't. (2) Your mental illness sounds concerning, particularly the alcoholism. Good that you are seeking treatment, but it doesn't sound like you are quite "cured" yet. I would think that this should be a priority alongside a good job. Although a bit of a catch-22, I guess. Tough to get a good job when you are mentally ill. Tough to get well when you are unemployed. But maybe you shouldn't aim as high as we were thinking. First get lower level white-collar office work, then target your mental illness, then target a shift up? Trying to get everything all at once may be too overwhelming. This is against the common attitude in America, but often we can't get everything in life.
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Aug 16, 2018 15:34
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I can't believe I'm half-agreeing with John Smith. I disagree with him on the motivation, your motivation is gone because of your mental illness. I completely get that, I do. Anyone who has read my on-again off-again thread knows that. I'm spitballing here, but are there companies doing what you are interested in where you could get in on something you're qualified for? That would help build your network, get you income again, and hopefully get you benefits so you can tackle your mental health problems (assuming you don't have government-provided benefits). Most office work will pay better than retail and be less physically demanding. I know that your exhaustion after a day's work isn't just because of the physical exertion of being on your feet all day, but hopefully it would help. And even if it's not what you want to be doing, if you find something that you can do that doesn't make you miserable, it's going to be easier to do something else after you're done with work. Are there meetups for professionals in that field? I get it if you don't like the idea, but that's something specifically designed to help networking. One thing that has helped me actually apply for jobs when unemployed and depressed is to say "Today I'm applying for X number of jobs." Then you keep going until that point. Or if not that, say "Today I'm job hunting for X hours." Maybe that would be better so that you aren't tempted to just shove out a poorly tailored application. Setting a specific goal for the day helps because you can see the finish line rather than just focusing on how it seems like you're throwing emails into the void.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:16
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I can't believe I'm half-agreeing with John Smith. I disagree with him on the motivation, your motivation is gone because of your mental illness. I completely get that, I do. Anyone who has read my on-again off-again thread knows that. I'm spitballing here, but are there companies doing what you are interested in where you could get in on something you're qualified for? That would help build your network, get you income again, and hopefully get you benefits so you can tackle your mental health problems (assuming you don't have government-provided benefits). Most office work will pay better than retail and be less physically demanding. I know that your exhaustion after a day's work isn't just because of the physical exertion of being on your feet all day, but hopefully it would help. And even if it's not what you want to be doing, if you find something that you can do that doesn't make you miserable, it's going to be easier to do something else after you're done with work. Point is, either way, the solution is the same. Slow and steady, to avoid a crash and burn. (And I wouldn't complain too much about me, if I was you. Considering that you lied in the BWM thread about the veteran benefits.)
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Aug 16, 2018 18:17
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OP what is your search geography?
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Aug 16, 2018 19:19
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I want to be a think tank writer but I refuse to leave the greatest city on planet earth, Terra Haute, Indiana! I know way too many people who think like this but with more ridiculously exclusive jobs and even shittier places.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:32
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John Smith posted:Some people are just lazy and crap, rather than lacking motivation due to mental illness. We don't know either way about the root cause, therefore we should reserve judgement. Yeah, it’s one step at a time when getting better. Just like you don’t go from physical therapy straight to a race. Small goals encourage you to keep going, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. And I already ate a probation for arguing with you, I’m no going to try to out-pedant you on the definition of paying.
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Aug 16, 2018 23:33
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John Smith posted:But maybe you shouldn't aim as high as we were thinking. First get lower level white-collar office work, then target your mental illness, then target a shift up? Trying to get everything all at once may be too overwhelming. This is against the common attitude in America, but often we can't get everything in life. This is basically the idea, and that last line there is one of the big deciding factors in why I flipped the apple cart. I've been told all of my life that a job, any job, is the most important single thing in my life. And if you want anything else, you MUST be holding a job while you're doing it or else you're worthless. 22 Eargesplitten posted:I can't believe I'm half-agreeing with John Smith. I disagree with him on the motivation, your motivation is gone because of your mental illness. I completely get that, I do. Anyone who has read my on-again off-again thread knows that. I'm spitballing here, but are there companies doing what you are interested in where you could get in on something you're qualified for? That would help build your network, get you income again, and hopefully get you benefits so you can tackle your mental health problems (assuming you don't have government-provided benefits). Most office work will pay better than retail and be less physically demanding. I know that your exhaustion after a day's work isn't just because of the physical exertion of being on your feet all day, but hopefully it would help. And even if it's not what you want to be doing, if you find something that you can do that doesn't make you miserable, it's going to be easier to do something else after you're done with work. It's 100% emotional exhaustion. I've done far more demanding physical activity than standing around in a 2x2 checklane box for 8 hours and felt ready for more. I've been setting X hour goals since Sunday to keep myself on track, essentially making the hunt my new job. Meetups and networking feel like the missing link for me. Overcoming the intimidating factor of a cold approach for selfish reasons (as opposed to an external goal like data gathering for a project) is something I'm working to overcome. John Smith posted:Some people are just lazy and crap, rather than lacking motivation due to mental illness. We don't know either way about the root cause, therefore we should reserve judgement.  Pryor on Fire posted:I want to be a think tank writer but I refuse to leave the greatest city on planet earth, Terra Haute, Indiana! West Michigan, the Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo migration zones. It is constrained right now since I lack the funds to pick up and move to a new place, unless you think I shouldn't be worried about that and should just jump at coastal/Chicago jobs until one sticks?
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Aug 17, 2018 15:34
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https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Business+Analyst&l=Grand+Rapids,+MI&radius=50&from=sug you can start there
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Aug 17, 2018 16:13
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22 Eargesplitten posted:they won't even pay survivor's benefits to war widows 22 Eargesplitten posted:Technically they're paying you 22 Eargesplitten posted:And I already ate a probation for arguing with you, I’m no going to try to out-pedant you on the definition of paying. There is a difference between not being paid, and not being paid more. You claimed that government funds were not paid out, when factually they were. Subjectively, you were also reluctant to cite official sources until I confronted you. Most honest people don't usually shy away. I am willing to drop the subject and allow you to remain here, rather than derail OP's thread. But I shall retain the last word, as I was factually correct. Warmachine posted:I've been told all of my life that a job, any job, is the most important single thing in my life. And if you want anything else, you MUST be holding a job while you're doing it or else you're worthless. Or do you have quite some savings or family support of sorts? I mean that is a nice luxury if yes. We don't know you. You might be a nice fellow who fell on hard times, you might be a lazy good-for-nothing. We don't know, and therefore we should reserve judgment. I mean, even alcoholics say they wanna change even when they have no intentions to actually do it, right? Saying is meaningless, doing is. So go do it. Edit: For more context, do read Zaurg's thread and you will really get a feel for what I mean. Motherfucker spends hundreds of pages claiming that he really wants to change, and justifying why he cannot change in spite of his best efforts. Saying you wanna improve means nothing in life. But I am not saying you are a bad guy either. John Smith fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Aug 17, 2018 |
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Aug 17, 2018 17:40
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John Smith posted:Nope, there is no dispute nor gentlemen's disagreement. You are completely and absolutely in the wrong entirely. was about the slapfight between you and 22. You've not given me anything to disagree with, and I'm not the tone-policing type. Do me a favor though: don't poo poo up my thread with your drama. That goes for both of you.Aside from posting about posting, I'm a bit chuffed that my Skype interview I was scheduled for fell through. The fellow from the UK wasn't able to connect with me for some reason. The headhunter got permission from him to pass his info on for me, so we're going to try and reschedule for early next week. Kyoon's lmgtfy post yielded some prospects, in spite of its sarcastic nature. I'll be submitting resumes to the promising ones today. 22 Eargesplitten posted:Are there meetups for professionals in that field? I get it if you don't like the idea, but that's something specifically designed to help networking. Rolling back to this one, part of the reason I created this thread is I'm not sure (where to look). Is this a "trawl meetup.com" thing, or are there specific communities that people in the analytics world hang out in and organize events? A reasonable assumption would be that colleges in the area (and West Michigan has plenty of that) organize events like this, but those are going to be feeding frenzies of current students won't they?
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Aug 17, 2018 19:05
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it wasn't intended to be sarcastic really Applying for an entry-level quantitative or analyitcal position is basically just finding stuff and blasting out resumes
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Aug 17, 2018 21:01
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Pre sales engineer for a tech co has a lot of overlap with what you are looking for and with your current experience. Also have you considered academia? Most jobs are not filled by interviewing applicants wo filled out a form for a job. Ask everyone you know even if they are not in the same sector. They might know someone who is hiring. Consider working with a recruiter. It is a lot easier to move up when you have a little more experience
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Aug 18, 2018 05:27
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Warmachine posted:
Hmm. So you are going to aim for analyst positions straightaway then? Thought that you might be more open to more basic white-collar positions while you work on your mental health? Or did your therapist felt that you had progressed enough that you can easily handle the stress and pressure of being an analyst? Wouldn't it be too much too soon for a recovering alcoholic who is dealing with a lot right now? I mean if it turns out that you can handle it and you gave up without even trying, that would be such a waste. But on the other hand, if you crash and burn, that would suck too, right?
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Aug 18, 2018 06:09
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shut up comma John Smith
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Aug 18, 2018 15:11
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Find a biz analyist or similar position. Learn to code in python, write hilariously short python scripts that you most stole from googling "market basket analysis tutorials" and what not. Put them on a dashboard for the boss. Be the fast up and coming new guy.
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Aug 18, 2018 17:12
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Moneyball posted:shut up comma John Smith If the former, that is already sorted. If the latter, then well, yes. I am very harsh, but I do think it is practical too. Aiming high *** sounds *** nice, but not if it causes you to crash and burn. Sure, he loses value if he aims too low, but he loses value if he crash and burns too.
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Aug 18, 2018 18:02
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i don't even know what John Smith is posting about since I have that idiot on ignore, but on behalf of all Asian-Americans I'd like to apologize. this is not who we are.
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Aug 19, 2018 17:28
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:i don't even know what John Smith is posting about since I have that idiot on ignore, but on behalf of all Asian-Americans I'd like to apologize. this is not who we are.
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Aug 19, 2018 19:15
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Warmachine posted:
I would go with Meetup personally, but I haven’t actually tried myself. There’s a shitload of ones in my area, but I work in tech and I’m in a pretty huge tech hub so I’m not sure what it’s like elsewhere. I’m also not sure how to tell what ones are actually active still.
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Aug 19, 2018 19:17
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:i don't even know what John Smith is posting about since I have that idiot on ignore, but on behalf of all Asian-Americans I'd like to apologize. this is not who we are. And John Smith is Asian??? My world is falling apart here.
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Aug 19, 2018 19:53
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moana posted:Wait wait wait. You're not black like KGJ??? Literally the rudest Asian dude I’ve never met. Weirds me out too.
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Aug 20, 2018 04:08
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 He's gone up like 150 places in a month or two. Obviously this is because SA is a far-left commie SJW hellhole and not because of his resemblance, personality-wise, to a leaky colostomy bag. C'mon goons, a few more clicks and he takes out FAROOQ! edit: if you ignore (  ) the goons higher in the list who are banned or permabanned, John Smith is the tenth-most ignored user on SAedit2: the more people who ignore him, the fewer times the rest of us will have to read his drivel in quotes Weatherman fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Aug 20, 2018 |
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Aug 20, 2018 12:18
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moana posted:Wait wait wait. You're not black like KGJ??? CarForumPoster posted:Literally the rudest Asian dude I’ve never met. Weirds me out too. Weatherman posted:
I don't know about the other posters in the BWM thread, but you do genuinely seem to be threatened by me in terms of your worldview. Why else this obsession with me? This is a internet forum, remember? Not real life. You gonna have greater internal strength, man.
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Aug 20, 2018 15:47
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Holy poo poo shut the gently caress upppp about John Smith OP, any updates on your situation? Did you get that Skype interview rescheduled?
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Aug 20, 2018 17:27
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John Smith posted:Internet rudeness doesn't count. I would, of course, not speak in such a rude confrontational aggressive manner in real life. Giving face, even when the other party is wrong, is considered important. Or at least within my own community. I actually meant KGJr. Dude is very rude.
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Aug 20, 2018 20:29
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So uh any posts related to the OP?
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Aug 20, 2018 22:06
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Get your Indeed and Linkedin going, apply to jobs, use a form filler application like last pass or whatever else to make applying on job sites super quick, applly to a lot of jobs, use your network. Resume/Interview https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3553582 LinkedIn thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3531540
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Aug 21, 2018 00:14
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John Smith is the ultimate anime. He's soooo tsundere. Good luck OP. Don't be an anime.
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Aug 23, 2018 06:58
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