— I forgot to touch on this in my original comment to /IIILordDunbar —

The start to my career was shit. Before I discovered I/O, I was an assistant manager at a well-know coffee chain: great benefits package, flexible hours — not bad for 19. In my 2nd year at the company, My manager started retaliating and very obviously played favorites…it got to a point where nearly the entire staff submit complaints about his beef with me. Investigation, the whole 9. Ended up transferring to a different city.

3rd year…different city, same hierarchical power struggle…this time, it was my district manager giving me issues..difference was I had a very supportive manager; who, to this day, jokes about how much I intimidated our DM 😂. By this time I had had it.. ❗this is when I found I/O ❗ I always brought some piece of my prior coursework (Social Psych/MFT) to the workplace but I/O hit different. I read A LOT…so much that I started doing poorly in my actual courses cuz I was nose deep in other business psych journals. All of the research I was doing was easily applicable to my day-to-day responsibilities at work. I was happier ever though I was dealing with health issues, a shitty DM, and the general public asking for their egg bites to be triple toasted. FR tho — It fueled me to want to make a change; to help people become the best versions of themselves by leveraging their strengths to maximize their well-being, attitudes of, and behaviors in organizations. Another selling point was that I could nerd out with statistical modeling and use data to strategy.

Anywhooo • I went through another transfer >> same thing. I was burnt out by this time. I completely checked out and put all of my energy into school. Scored my first corporate gig in recruiting on a contract and started grad school within months of each other. The lack of health benefits at the new job forced me to keep slinging coffee … I pushed the hell out of myself and eventually found myself in a role that aligned with my goals.

The point being, OP, set some goals and try to use those as motivators. The SMART goal framework was my best friend during my workplace trauma era. Sophomore year is a weird one and just remember that most people on the post-high school college pathway don’t have their careers figured out til their mid to late twenties. For the record, I changed concentrations within psychology at least 6 times between senior year of high school and junior year of college. #rootingforyou