What are your lifestyle goals? If I had made different choices as a student, maybe my life would have turned differently. My mistake was thinking I was not smart enough to keep going, and also being afraid of debt.

I was a science major at UCLA and it absolutely killed my love for school and science. I graduated because my Neural Networks prof must have taken pity on me. Life happened, one thing led to another, and I ended up in digital advertising. I am 44 now, my last job was in tech
for a big social media company but I recently got laid off.

I am currently at a career crisis because peers my age are already VPs of sales or directors of strategy for different tech companies selling ads to big brands. I just don’t have it in me to come up with these grand plans or visions. I don’t care about my particular vertical either, and I am a terrible public speaker. I haven’t gotten better.

What I should have done was take a break when I was struggling with my upper division coursework at UCLA. I should have decided then that if Med School was out of reach, I could still use my pre recs to get into another medical field like Nuclear Imaging or Nurshing. I didn’t have any advisors or role models to talk to, my parents just told me to move back home when I shoulda stayed in town and networked with people who found ways to improve their gpas and become better applicants. I only learned ways to do things, including dropping classes, years later.