It’s been a long, meandering path to where I now stand. Finding a career job has been difficult, and despite my wishes to the contrary, is still a work in progress.

And yet, though the journey has been challenging and the way unclear, I am still glad for the experience I’ve accrued, and the knowledge I’ve gained along the way.

There’s the bookstore job, which I took on while I was finishing up the last few courses of my undergraduate degree. It made it possible for me to build my independence, and introduced me to people I never would have met otherwise. It also taught me how much I value working with my mind, that I thrive best with new challenges on the horizon, and how hard it is, financially and psychologically, to live on near-minimum wage.

There’s the utility company, where I worked in a variety of administrative positions on a term contract basis. It taught me how to function as part of a team, to be flexible and agile, that the planning and time management I relied on so heavily as an undergraduate is one of my greatest assets. I realized in this time how much I enjoy working with computer systems, and that I wanted to know not only the how but also the why of the systems I relied on daily. My time here made it clear to me that, as I was shuffled internally from one position to another according to need and long-term leaves, that I have a deep need to feel I belong and can make a lasting impact, but that the types of opportunities available to a BA in the utility business were not where I could see myself long-term. Here, I had the living wage, but still could not find the job satisfaction I craved.

And so, between the instability of the economy, the looming end of my contract with the utility company, and the limited opportunities available to me, I returned to higher education. In the final years of my undergraduate degree, the university began offering a Masters in Humanities Computing, and that knowledge had stuck in my mind like burr in the intervening years. It taught me that, by building up my computer skills, I could find a niche for my humanities background in the wider world. I learned basic programming, web markup and stylesheets, how servers work, how to integrate and manage a dataset stored in a database. I learned how to figure things out on the fly, to cope with demands that require specialized knowledge without a clear path to it. I learned to be the person mediating between the people with the ideas and the people who could build it. I learned new strategies for managing stress, and just how far a little communication can go to alleviate a hard situation. It reminded me once again how much I value working in a team environment, and showed me that, as amazing as I am in situations requiring self-motivation, I am even better when I have common goals and a support network.

Post-Masters has been challenging.

I’m fortunate, in that I’ve been able to continue with some paid project work I started as a graduate student. I’m even more fortunate that I was able to pick up a part-time web development contract, which spun out into a new web development contract. It’s reinforced how much I enjoy working with websites and building up the infrastructure that makes others’ work possible. It led me to deepen my knowledge of the WordPress CMS, which I am currently working with most.

However, that permanent long-term job has remained elusive.

It’s maddening, sending resume after resume out into the void and getting only a small number of responses in return. It’s heartbreaking to interview, to fall in love with a team and a role, only to have it go to someone else. It’s frustrating to watch the months accrue, to see no stability in sight, to have my capacity for long-term planning limited.

All I need to do is keep going forward. Send out one more resume. Tweak my web portfolio. Take that WordPress course. Go to that networking event. Spend more time with Photoshop and Illustrator. Fight back the voice that says it’s not enough, I’m not enough.

Do my best to make my own luck.

It will happen eventually. Not many people are permitted the smooth path from education to career. I have no regrets for how I got here, no matter how challenging it is not to see where I am going.

The time in between is the hard part, and what is life but a series of in-betweens?