.jpg)
I started applying for jobs in the first week of my senior year at Stanford, operating on the quiet assumption that by graduation, I’d already have something lined up. Around me, friends were locking down offers in finance and consulting—industries where recruiting starts so early it feels almost preordained. I wasn’t in a pipeline. Instead, I’d spent my college years embedded in Silicon Valley, running marketing for startups that moved fast and burned bright.
For nine months, I tracked every application in a spreadsheet. Eventually, I deleted the “Second Round Interview” column. I wasn’t making it that far. Most of the time, I didn’t hear back at all.
By the time I walked across the stage in 2025, I still didn’t have a full-time offer.
I had experience, but in the eyes of the market, it didn’t count. When I did hear back, it was for internships. One came through an alumni referral. Another was in a field completely disconnected from my background. What stung most was the quiet irony: by my own accounting, I had seven years of marketing experience. I’d started at fifteen, helping local small businesses with outreach and strategy. In college, that work scaled into 30-to-40-hour-a-week roles alongside my coursework. I’d even switched my major from engineering to English and linguistics, betting that mastery of language and narrative would make me a sharper marketer. Instead, I started worrying I’d become the cliché I’d spent years trying to outrun: the unemployed English major.
As a financial aid student, the pressure was concrete. I refused to lean on my parents after graduation, but the longer the search dragged on, the more I found myself considering roles that wouldn’t solve anything—they’d just delay the reckoning.
The job market, it turned out, wasn’t what I’d been taught to expect. At places like Stanford, the script is simple: intern every summer, convert to full-time, ride the momentum into adulthood. But in 2025, the momentum had stalled. I wasn’t just competing with my peers. I was up against recently laid-off professionals with years of title-backed experience. Entire sectors were freezing hiring or shrinking their teams. The golden gates weren’t just heavy; they were locked.
So I stopped waiting for them to open.
I started saying yes to whatever work found me. A professor asked if I’d help run a book campaign. I’d never worked in publishing or PR, but I told her yes. Around the same time, I connected with a journalist through Stanford’s alumni network and began editing her drafts, pitching stories, and managing her newsletter. Even in the thick of my own uncertainty, I could feel the difference my work was making. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was meaningful. And for the first time in months, it felt like progress.
Three weeks before graduation, after being rejected from a minimum-wage internship following three grueling interview rounds, I made a decision: I would stop applying for jobs and start creating one. I filed paperwork for an LLC. I built a website. I named it Punctuation PR. I told my parents I was launching a marketing and publicity agency for writers and academics. If the economy wouldn’t hand me a seat at the table, I’d build my own.
They didn’t just accept it. They championed it. My mom told me she was proud—not because I was giving myself a job, but because I was building something that might one day give jobs to others.
The day after graduation, I packed my car, drove from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, and set up shop in a barely unpacked apartment. I turned those side projects into paying clients. I cold-emailed authors, professors, and independent publishers. I drafted contracts, set up invoicing, and slowly raised my rates. One referral led to another. Another led to a contract. Then a retainer.
For the first few months, I lived paycheck to paycheck. When credit card balances outpaced cash flow, I sold my clothes and furniture. I worked twelve-hour days, sometimes fourteen. But within six months, I was earning more than the entry-level roles I’d been rejected from. By early 2026, Punctuation PR had crossed into six figures. I’d partnered with over a dozen clients, forged relationships with major publishers and media outlets, and helped books reach hundreds of thousands of new readers. What began as a survival tactic had become a sustainable business.
It changed how I think about work entirely. I used to believe success operated on inertia: once you were moving in the right direction, momentum would carry you forward. But life doesn’t work that way. It’s a series of course corrections, unbalanced forces, and deliberate pivots. In 2026, the institutions that once promised stability now feel fragile to an entire generation. Traditional paths aren’t broken, but they’re no longer guaranteed.
Starting a company is still one of the riskiest things you can do. I hope to scale Punctuation PR from six to seven figures in the years ahead. There’s no certainty I will. But there’s also no certainty I won’t. And for the first time, that uncertainty belongs entirely to me.