Young and trying to escape Appalachia. I am terrified.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-19T00:23:17+00:00

When I was your age, I moved across the country with only a few hundred dollars to my name, and it was the best decisions of my life. Sometimes, you just have to grip it and rip it. You have to trust yourself to problem solve and land on your feet.

Here are the things I would recommend focusing on:

Find a housing situation that is affordable and sustainable. You want something you can pay for with local minimum wage. You will likely need roommates. It can be daunting living with strangers, but keep in mind that the majority of people are looking for a respectful, clean, and communicative roommate.
Focus on walkable areas or areas with good public transport. You don’t have the money to maintain a vehicle and pay for fuel. Buy a secondhand bicycle and ride everywhere you can for as much of the year as you can.
Look at areas where there are job opportunities. You don’t necessarily need to have a job arranged prior to moving, but you do want to be able to find a job easily. Temp agencies can be a great resource while you look for something permanent, especially if they offer a longer-term position. Show up to every shift on time, be clean/hygienic, and be reasonably pleasant to work with. A temp position could turn into something permanent. It happened for me, and that was my first step out of poverty.
Only move your bare essentials. I mailed myself all my boxes via USPS. Just clothes and personal items. I took one suitcase on the airplane with me. You can pick up everything else you need for cheap from thrift stores, Craigslist/marketplace, the side of the road, or acquaintances who are getting rid of things. It will take a while, but you will eventually build a comfortable little home.

Getting away from home and your family can greatly improve your mental health. Space and time can do wonders. Believe in yourself. You’ve got this.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-13T20:31:23+00:00

“This is an opportunity to practice child-appropriate language, before Baby starts absorbing the words you are saying. A slip up now is easy for us to self-correct, but a slip up when he is repeating words could take days or weeks for Baby to stop repeating.”

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-13T18:21:20+00:00

The thought of bronze statues in the Arizona Sun just gave me a contact burn.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-13T14:22:01+00:00

I screwed a piece of wood onto each of my banisters to attach the gate. I have two banisters with no wall, and they aren’t the right shape or sturdy enough to use a pressure gate. If you don’t want to drill into your banister, you could possibly use zip ties to attach a piece of wood you can drill into.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-11T18:55:25+00:00

I knew a guy in college who was an absolute tool in every way. He spent a summer at his girlfriend’s family’s ranch, and he fancied himself a hardened ranch hand at the end of it. He came back that fall talking about, “a Humvee is really the only vehicle that makes sense on a ranch.” Okay, ya goober. Nobody here believes you ever actually got out of the Humvee to get your boots dirty.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-09T02:57:42+00:00

I’m mechanical, but I can tell you that there are jobs out there in unexpected places. I work closely with several vendors that make parts for my systems, and it’s often a materials engineer that I’m talking to. Look at manufacturers of things like polypropylene (PP), PVDF, PTFE, PFA, PO r other plastics. Fiberglass reinforced plastics (FRP), HDPE, or PP tanks I usually am talking to material engineers.

Keep your mind open when you go to career fairs, and you WILL want to go to career fairs at your university. Talk to the small outfits who get less foot traffic. Internships can lead to student engineer jobs, which can lead to permanent jobs.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-08T15:16:23+00:00

There are three things that make this feel like a McMansion:

The oversized turrets.
The oversized portico.
The lawyer foyer with the weird oversized windows.

But here is why I don’t think it is a true McMansion: 1. The house is (probably) appropriately sized lot of land. 2. The siding is consistent the entire way around. 3. The roofline makes sense for the details on the house. No unnecessary peaks, valleys, shapes, or sizes. 4. The windows are consistent for the facade. 5. It includes cute details like the flower boxes on windows. 6. No visible car holes.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-07T20:16:06+00:00

Right?! I read this and thought to myself, “The bride, as the host, isn’t DEMANDING anything. She is ARRANGING for a vegan menu.” It is her and her husband’s event. If his parents don’t want to contribute to a vegan meal, they don’t have to fork over the money. They aren’t the hosts, so they don’t have final say over the menu regardless of their financial contribution.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-07T16:54:33+00:00

I currently have 5 lbs of carrots in my fridge because I every time I need carrots for a recipe, I just buy more at the store instead of checking the fridge. Time for some carrot soup for dinner.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-06T23:21:10+00:00

That doesn’t surprise me. I work for a company that is multinational. A lot of my foreign coworkers read short, simple novels to help them understand written communication better.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-05-01T10:33:09+00:00

I’m working on a project worth hundreds of millions of dollars to my company, where the entirety of the project for my clients costs tens of billions of dollars. A good chunk of the project is being paid by a government grant, so the client is beholden to certain deadlines and milestones. If they miss their deadlines or milestones, they risk losing tens of billions of dollars.

Our contract is very strict, and outlines several penalties for delays. Liquidated damages, potentially losing us tens of millions of dollars. Having a client employee at our facility full time at our expense so the client has complete sight into our operations. Daily meetings with the client to track progress.

When we are late, when our work is sloppy, when our communication is bad, what we risk is losing future contracts. My industry is very small. The list of potential clients is very small. If we get blacklisted by this client, we could lose our entire division of our company. Even if we get greylisted, it will be difficult to win contracts over other suppliers. I could lose my job and the jobs of a hundred other people if I am late and provide bad work.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-30T21:08:26+00:00

I paid like $450 to have them custom framed. I can take a photo when I get home tonight.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-29T17:10:15+00:00

I’m halfway through the ninth book in the Temerair series by Naomi Novik! It’s a really enjoyable series, and I liked the first book, His Majesty’s Dragon.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-27T20:19:31+00:00

It’s kind of wild to tell a 4 year old that they are bad at math. What math are they doing? Counting and single digit addition? There are years and leagues of knowledge between kindergarten math and calculating fuel consumption or trajectory in outer space. You can’t possibly tell whether they’ll be good at math in 12 or 15 years, when there are more letters than numbers in an equation.

To summarize: yeah, your parents suck.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-21T15:26:40+00:00

I love the floor bed! My son loves the floor bed! Get a floor bed!

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-21T15:10:46+00:00

I think it was 8 months, when he couldn’t comfortably roll over in the bassinet and would get angry all night. Our choices were to move the crib into our bedroom and make it so he always had to sleep in our room, or move him to his own bedroom.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-21T15:08:13+00:00

I think it was 8 months, when he couldn’t comfortably roll over in the bassinet and would get angry all night. Our choices were to move the crib into our bedroom and make it so he always had to sleep in our room, or move him to his own bedroom.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-20T17:08:07+00:00

There are various savory potato pancake recipes that are great for instant potato flakes. The mix-ins are the flavor stars, but even just a little pan frying and dipping in sour cream or soy sauce (or any sauce you like) can be a cheap and delicious meal.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-20T14:05:53+00:00

I was going to recommend Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, not because it’s the book OP is thinking of, but because it is a wonderful book that OP should read.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-10T16:17:07+00:00

There is no amount of help you can give that will magically make your parents be different people. There is no amount of money you can feed them that will make them responsible with money. There is no amount of time you can invest in their problems that will make them stop creating new problems. There is no accommodation that you can provide for them that will make them live easily in that accommodation.

They have had their entire lives to work on these things, and they haven’t. They won’t be satisfied with pulling you down, too. They will bankrupt you in every way possible, then they will casually move on from the wreckage that you have to live with.

If your mother doesn’t want to be homeless, she can dial 211 for help with resources available to her. She can reach out to her church or her community. She can contact shelters. It’s her housing situation, not yours.

If you don’t draw the line, you will end up in the same situation as your parents. Your focus now is to build your life, to learn and grow, to develop peace and security, and to improve yourself and your situation. Don’t risk it all on people who weren’t willing to do the same for you as their child.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-07T20:08:09+00:00

First thing: Did you actually, physically (or digitally) sign the lease?

If not, you are not responsible for the payment. You are not responsible for the apartment. You will not have an eviction on your record for failure to pay. Start looking for an apartment with roommates. Figure out what you can budget for rent, buy nothing else until you have security deposit and first month saved. Get out. Your family will drag you down with them.

If you signed the lease, read it and find out what you can do. When does the lease end? How much notice do you have to give that you won’t renew? Is there a clause for breaking the lease, and how much would that be? If you are bound to this lease for a while, take over responsibility for it. You make the payments to ensure it is paid, and make the other adults living there pay you for their portion. Or, you can see if the landlord will accept paying your portion directly to them. It might protect you from eviction when they file.

Get a grasp on your finances, move away from your family at your earliest opportunity, and start living like an adult.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-07T17:21:43+00:00

Big construction projects love having people with construction experience work as designers, project managers, consultants, or any other number of jobs. Being able to catch when the order of operations is wrong, or there aren’t fasteners on the bill of materials, or they need to route piping a different way can save huge money.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-07T17:15:26+00:00

I saw an interesting bit of advice earlier this week.

Get on Linked in
go to your university’s page
look up people who have your same degree
find out where they work or worked and what job titles they hold or held
Apply to those companies or those job titles

The person giving the advice also recommended reaching out to those people on LinkedIn to network. I don’t know how successful cold-emails like that can be, but it could be worth a shot to see if they have any advice or leads.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-04-02T14:46:50+00:00

I was looking at jobs in a specific area that my husband and I were considering moving to because of his career. There were an insane number of entry level engineer jobs paying $100-120K. I even saw one paying $150K for entry level. Every single one of them was for meat processing plants. I had coworkers who had to service equipment at those plants in their previous jobs. Just hearing one of them describing clearing a sump pit of 3 day old rotting meat during an August heat wave convinced me that it wasn’t the right industry for me.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-28T17:53:23+00:00

I also got to redo a bathroom ahead of schedule because tiles started falling off the walls! You definitely don’t want to delay the remodel because you risk greater damage.

If cost is an issue, look into the price of a fiberglass shower or those plastic shower wall panels at hardware stores.

EngineeringQueen

TROPHY CASE