Almost a year out of college, I still don't have a full-time job in my field. Most mornings, I'm up before 5 a.m. to pour lattes for other people's workdays.
I moved from California to New York City in 2022 to become a journalist. I did the internships. I worked on the student paper. By graduation, I had a modest portfolio and what I thought was enough hustle to make it work.
I was wrong — or at least, the market was.
I started applying for jobs months before I even walked across the stage. Cover letters, networking events, job boards, cold emails. Around 50 applications in, I had nothing. By graduation day, I had to make a decision: rent was due, my internship had ended, and journalism wasn't paying my bills. So I went back to what I always had — barista work.
That was almost a year ago.
Entry-level job postings in New York City have dropped 37% since 2022, according to the Center for an Urban Future. That number didn't surprise me. I'd lived it. But knowing the market is broken doesn't make it easier to explain to people why someone with a journalism degree is steaming milk for a living.
I tell people I'm a freelance journalist. Technically, that's true. But most of my week is spent behind the counter of a neighborhood coffee shop. The rest goes to freelance gigs when I can find them, babysitting, and building something like a real life in this city.
The question I return to, over and over, is a simple one: why am I still here?
New York is expensive and exhausting. It will grind you down if you let it. And yet — I stay. So do a lot of people like me.
Last week, between orders, my coworker — an aspiring actor — brought up Patrick Ball, who spent over a decade doing survival jobs and self-tapes before landing his role on The Pitt. On CBS Mornings, he described the audition that changed everything as just another self-tape from his apartment. One of a thousand.
I've sent out 150 job applications since graduation. I'm nowhere near a thousand. But I understood exactly what he meant when he said he'd started to believe his break would never come.
That feeling doesn't make you quit. Somehow, it makes you stay.
Then, recently, something shifted.
I got an offer — a full-time position in my field, on the East Coast. I'm still figuring out whether it's the right move. But just receiving it reminded me of something I'd quietly stopped believing: that I was still in the running.
This past year wasn't wasted. It taught me how to build a life around uncertainty, how to find community when your career plan falls apart, and how to want something from a place of genuine desire rather than desperation.
I don't know exactly what comes next. But I'm not ready to go home.
Not quite yet.