It Gave Me Experience With Different Roles And Industries A lot of people see job experience the same way they see money: as if its value intrinsically comes from having a lot of it. If you have five years of experience working in the legal industry as a paralegal, you can afford a fancier paralegal job at a fancier law firm. It’s easy to forget that experience isn’t about numbers. It's about that certain level of competency and knowledge that you can’t absorb in a classroom.

Like a lot of new adults, after reaching the end of my preordained school path and stumbling into the nonlinear “real” world, I got lost. Declaring a college major had been hard enough. Now I had to declare a career—that one element of adulthood that felt so much more permanent and self-defining than anything I’d ever done in school. With only a bachelor’s degree in English, a few post-graduation days of frenzied job research, and just enough courage to resist retreating to a