I got a degree in STEM that hasn’t been useful to me. Turns out the sorts of jobs I got it for don’t really exist anymore/around me, and where they do, they pull from other more traditional graduate and post-graduate pools. At this point it’s been long enough since I got it without working a role related to my field that it’d be pretty hard to get hired into even if the labor market wasn’t falling apart. So I switched gears and applied my breadth of knowledge to a different goal, and that’s a work in progress. Time will tell if it’s successful.

But I started when I was in my mid 20s, and it was a very good time of my life, even with a lot of negative life events in that time. If I could be a professional student, I would have loved to.

However, I tried to pursue a masters through online courses, but I wasn’t really excited about the specificity of it (I’m more of a generalist), and I wasn’t in the right mental state to do it properly, so I withdrew. So who knows if professional student would have really worked for me or not.