4 months ago I was scoring interviews with companies like MTV, and signed on to a job for a company that’s pretty notorious in the social gaming industry. Immediately after taking the job, I received multiple interview requests from poachers on Linkedin. That’s how big this company was in the industry. I was being contacted via Facebook by advertising start-ups that wanted me to use their services. I was a fucking bad ass.
I was expected to monetize our games through ads, sourcing and placing the ad networks myself. I was expected to provide pre-launch marketing support to key games, and to triple one game’s revenue in three months. I was expected to completely revamp an app, to proofread and write promotional copy, and to optimize the inventory within our games, striking a balance between internal promotions, external cross promotions, and ad inventory. I was thinking about buying a house, and was ready to go to B-school and have children before 30. I was on track towards my dream of having 3 kids, a nice place to live, a decent car, and a 6 figure salary.
I quit because 1) I didn’t want to dedicate my life solely to squeezing dollars out of virtual consumers and 2) I wanted to eventually be my own boss and have some level of autonomy. In a business setting, unless you’re at the executive level, you pretty much have someone to always answer to, and will sometimes have to sacrifice your own opinions to please the person above you. At least in a scientific world, you can debate differences of opinion in a more scientific manner, instead of just saying, “but this feeeeeels right.”
Now, I’m postponing my career until I turn 30 and the only chance of me making a 6 figure salary is if I open my own practice—which I would love to do, actually. I’m hoping that I won’t have to work on the weekends or extremely odd hours if I do open up my own practice.
But I’m taking classes at a community college to get into Physical Therapy school, and I am so uninspired by my classmates and my professors right now. When you think you’re smarter than your professors, something must be wrong. At least I’m pretty sure I can teach better than them, given the same body of knowledge. I’ve been through this curriculum before, so I know what it’s like to receive quality education. I’m sure they’ve experienced that themselves too, so I have no idea why their teaching is so lackluster.
I miss Berkeley. Sure the competition was fierce, but at least I knew that I could rely on my classmates, professors, and TAs to be able to field my questions if I needed them to. I could collaborate with my lab partner and trust that they could keep up, if not challenge my intelligence. And if they couldn’t keep up, at least they weren’t THAT far behind.
Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawd.
