I work in digital marketing for a UK retail company. It doesn’t pay very well, my workload has trebled over the last year and with the passing of each day I’m convinced I want to do something else…
I studied English and American literature as a BA. Then I did an additional year doing a Masters of Research which involved writing a 35,000 word these. Though it’s all in the past, you can do a masters in anything these days and I sort of wish I’d done it in a completely different subject, like journalism or even law.
I’m an in-house graphic designer for a corporation, unofficially the digital specialist. I’ve got a BA in graphic design but its turned out to be a relic of a time when I thought this field would be interesting to me and it…really isn’t.
I split my time between working at a school and making animation independently in a two person team. The money that comes in on the animation end fluctuates wildly year to year so having another means of income is reassuring, while also being a great nuisance.
I have certainly spent a lot of time thinking about game creation, less about games journalism. Maybe doing video production?..
I went to a Japanese university and graduated with a B.A. in Japanese Language and Literature. It has never served me professionally (directly anyway) but personally, creatively, etc. I am happy with it.
Not sure any of this is helpful but now you know another type of person wandering these threads~
I’m currently graduating with an IT engineering degree (basically my school took the CS degree removed the Calc2 onward math and said fill that with tech electives) and am looking at going into cyber security because digital forensics is pretty fun it turns out. I have a few interviews lined up for the next few weeks so fingers crossed.
As far as game related work goes I’ve been an active member of the Source Engine modding community and worked on an indie title briefly before I left because the boss was a megalomaniac. Fresh out of high school I wanted to do game programing but a few people I know ended up in various AAA studios and after hearing them talk about it I realized I much rather just keep it as a hobby (except maybe Ubisoft, the people I know that work there seem to really like it).
Just going to leave some advice for others looking into getting into game dev that was passed on to me so that it maybe will help someone else as well as I had no real knowledge on what I should be considering until friends talked to me about it.
If money is at all a concern realize that nongame programming jobs almost always pay better. It might not be a bad idea to just have a normal 9-5 job and do game dev as a hobby
A lot of places still prefer CS degrees over degrees like Game Design and Game Programing
Ask where alumni have ended up, your university and professors should know this
Do work outside of the classroom
Network a lot, industry isn’t huge knowing people can get you in places
More indies fail then succeed you just never hear about them because it doesn’t make for good reading
I work in a research lab, trying to repurpose existing drugs as antimicrobial agents. Mostly this amounts to pipetting very small quantities of clear fluid into other very small quantities of clear fluid. But every once in a while I discover something new, and then for a few hours or a day I get to be the only person who’s ever lived who knows this very small very esoteric thing about how the world works, and I find that really exciting! I also work in an HIV clinic once a week, which is sometimes frustrating (re: dealing with endless paperwork and red tape, not dealing with people - I <3 my patients) but always rewarding.
Training was kind of rough, and the fact that the rules discouraged you from accessing any kind of mental health care didn’t help. Definitely spent my fair share of time crying behind closed doors in a hospital call room. But I’m happy and have a steady and personally fulfilling career now, so I guess it all worked out in the end.
I’m in a similar boat. I dropped out of Community College a few years ago, and now I’m moving boxes for a major shipping company. It’s easy to feel alienated when it seems like so many in the circles I run in are achieving their dreams; but I’m coming to terms with the fact that not only is are there multiple paths to success, but there are also multiple types of success.
I just got my PhD in Chemical Biology, during which I evolved enzymatic pathways in E. coli using synthetic biology techniques. In addition, I spent a good amount of time helping design and facilitate online courses in food science. I’m currently looking for work in microbial and enzyme engineering for energy/food industries, having realized that pharma isn’t really my cup of tea.
I never really considered a career in gaming, but I did choose to pursue science despite also having a degree in music (with a focus on musicology/music history rather than performance). It’s very common that I doubt myself and my choices, but I’m pretty certain that no matter which path I chose, I’d always have imposter syndrome and the feeling that the grass is greener on the other side - fortunately I’ve got friends doing wildly different things with their lives to help provide valuable perspectives about what my work means for myself and others and what alternative paths would require that I’m not really keen on doing. For now, I’m pretty content with being a representative of STEM in a lot of non-scientific communities, since in general we don’t as a culture like to consider science as a human endeavor or product of individual labor. Teaching general education courses that emphasize the ways in which we perform science in everyday life has been immensely rewarding, and I hope I can continue doing this sort of work as a hobby regardless of where I end up next.
Currently working for a digital marketing agency as a back end developer (mostly C# .net MVC api development and implementing a CMS for marketing websites). I’d never really done a lot of client-based work before this job. It’s kind of stressful and I don’t know if I like it.
I wrote news/reviews/a couple of pretty boring features for a smaller site back in the late 00’s for “fun”, I think the only payment I really got out of it was burger king at PAX one time, and I stumbled upon the google drive folder with what I assume is most of my old writing and cringe at how cliche and bad most of it is, which was kind of fun for about 3 minutes. I’m debating deleting the folder, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I guess my only real advice for that is don’t work for free (even though that might seem like your only option to build up a portfolio and get criticism to improve), but I don’t really have any good, actionable solutions for that
I’m currently working on a shmup in javascript in my free time, and it’s pretty fun. It’s really helping me learn a lot about the weird parts of javascript that I don’t use too often in my day-to-day at work (I also never took a proper course on JS in school, which seems completely backwards in this day and age).
I dropped out of college before certifying into a major because even with the GI Bill, I couldn’t pay for a two semesters of junk classes to make up for my GPA being torpedoed by a dispute with an infamous professor. So now I install satellite TV and try to not think about how worn out my body is only 1/3 through life.
I’m finishing up a PhD in Spanish Literature right now, graduating in December (with a focus on comics studies and colonial Latin America) and I work in the Spanish department of the university. I’m the Instructional Services Coordinator for the Spanish gen ed programs, which is a fancy way of saying that I deal with the administrative hassle of corralling 30+ teachers and 1200+ students a semester into following departmental policy and preparing all the online course resources.
I want to college for marketing, got my BA. Essentially stressed for a summer and worked at a gas station which is not fun in the summer when you’re emptying trash bins in 90 degree weather with it being much hotter on the asphalt. Then the dumpster would be home to a community of hornets.
They I stumbled into a podcast advertising gig which was not something I was expecting in my small city. It is a real neat world to be in.
I got a BA in creative writing and psychology, which doesn’t open to a lot of job prospects fresh out of college when you don’t have the dedication for grad school. Worked for a sales call center for a big company, and part of that was learning about other digital marketing things so you can argue against them.
Once I found out what SEO was I dropped out of the call center for a catch-all digital marketing job at a very small firm, worked there for a year, then I moved and now i’m one of those people who Manage And Create Content for a different Big Company. It’s not exactly work i’m excited about, but the client and manager seem to be happy with it, pays the bills, and beggars can’t be choosers. I expect within 5 years for this kind of job to not really exist the way it does now, so I am keeping an eye out on what could be the Next Thing.
For a brief period in-between jobs I wrote freelance for very small game news websites, but now I mainly write scripts for game stories for fun. Have picked up programming as a hobby and while I’m surprised by how much I’ve been able to wrap my head around it, I feel like a lot of the fun/curiosity would get sucked away if I did it for a career…
I am currently a wine shop employee and a fitness center front desk associate, but this fall I’m going to enter grad school for my Master’s and begin a job tutoring, which hopefully should lead me towards rhetorical education! My career goal is to work in community college after the MA and see where I go from there.
It’s my inaugural post here on the forums! Figures I should post in the topic that seems most prevalent at the moment. I previously worked as an investigator with Child Protective Services in the state of Texas. Great pay, great benefits, and some incredible experiences completely overshadowed by an utter lack of work/life balance. I still have nightmares about that job and I’ve been unemployed for a little over two months now. At least hearing my cellphone ring or vibrate doesn’t send a wave of anxiety over me anymore! Unemployment has been a blessing and a curse because I’ve had so much free time to be able explore interests that I hadn’t been able to while working with CPS. I joined my first DnD group and it’s been endlessly fulfilling and satisfying, but the anxiety of not having income and seeing my bank account dwindle is constantly on my mind. On the plus side, I have some interviews coming up! Hoping I can find the job that makes me love waking up every morning while still giving me time and energy to pursue other things.
My business cards say ‘Lead Software Developer’, I’ve been working on ‘AAA’ games for roughly 15 years.
My primary hobby right now is trying to review every game in my Steam library.
I dropped out of University almost three years ago (a combination of being a mediocre student and not nearly having the money to pay rent and tuition), and basically fell into a retail position immediately after.
As unsatisfying as the job is, it turns out I’m pretty okay at it. At least good enough to keep a consistent 40 hours at a position that usually offers less than 20 to most. So that’s nice at least. The pay isn’t great, and the benefits are pretty barebones, but at least it’s something until I come up with something that isn’t as soulcrushing.
I try to tell myself that. I pay the bills, I pay for the stuff I want, and I don’t even necessarily have a ‘dream job’ (maybe lottery winner or trophy husband), but sometimes while I’m covered in dirt I’m like, man, this sucks. And I’m scared that even after I get my degree, I won’t like what I do, so I’ll have spent even more time and money just for it to go to waste.
I’m a mid level manger for FedEx, it’s awful and soul crushing and as soon as I get outta debt ima quit and go work for one of the factories around here, just like everyone else that lives in my town that hasn’t left by the time they are 30.
If you can even afford the loss in sleep/work hours. I’ve had to work 60 hour weeks for three years just to make enough to begin making payments on my student loans while also eating and sleeping indoors. In that time, the balance doubled while I was trying to survive on $100 a month after essential bills were paid.
