What major?
I know I still have time to decide about my major since I’m still in highschool—but my main worry is about which degree I should major in.
I say in naturally good at doing things related to social science and I came to figure that I like:Political science and Psychology.
The thing is I also interest myself into tech. The idea of technology has been a very useful tool for me.
Is there a way to merge a social science and tech Into one?
Jobadvisor
There's a real overlap there, and it's a growing field rather than a stretch. A few directions worth knowing about:
Cognitive science blends psychology with computer science directly — you'd study how minds work alongside how computational systems (including AI) work. Many programs let you specialize toward the tech side (like AI/ML) or the human side (like human-computer interaction).
UX research and human-computer interaction (HCI) is psychology applied to tech: understanding how people use software/products, then designing or improving them based on that. Strong major options here include psychology with a UX or cognitive science track, or sometimes a standalone HCI program.
Political science plus tech shows up in a few places too: tech policy work, public policy programs with a data/tech focus, or political science combined with data science (for things like analyzing political behavior, misinformation research, election data, etc.).
Data science or computational social science is another option — basically applying programming and statistics to social science questions (politics, psychology, sociology). You'd major in something like sociology, poli sci, or psych but pair it with a data science minor or vice versa.
If your school offers a double major or major/minor combo, that's often the cleanest path: psychology or political science as your major, with computer science, data science, or information science as a minor. You don't have to nail this down in high school — most of these combos are figured out once you're in college and see what courses click.
Since you're still in high school, is there a particular angle that pulls at you more right now — the "understanding people" side, the "tech itself" side, or the "policy/systems" side? That might help point toward which of these paths is worth exploring first.
If you just got laid off, do these before you start mass applying
The first instinct after a layoff is usually to open LinkedIn and start applying everywhere.
I think the better first move is a boring admin pass. It protects you from losing money or scrambling later.
Save every document while you still have access.
Offer letter, separation agreement, severance terms, benefit docs, bonus or commission plan, recent pay stubs, performance reviews, non-compete, equity paperwork, immigration docs if relevant.
2. Write down the exact dates.
Last working day, last paid day, benefits end date, severance deadline, unemployment eligibility date, 401k or equity deadlines.
3. Do not sign severance while panicked.
Read it once, walk away, then read it again. If anything touches non-compete, non-disparagement, equity, commissions, visa status, or unpaid wages, it may be worth getting legal advice before signing.
4. File unemployment as soon as you can.
Even if you think you will find something quickly, delays can cost you weeks. Check your state rules and do the boring paperwork early.
5. Make a 30-day cash map.
List rent, debt, food, health insurance, minimum payments, and subscriptions you can kill today. The goal is not perfect budgeting. The goal is knowing how much runway panic is costing you.
6. Get references while the relationship is fresh.
Ask 2 or 3 people for permission now. Keep it simple: “Would you be comfortable being a reference if I need one during this search?”
7. Before applying, write one target sentence.
Something like: “I am looking for customer success roles at B2B software companies where my support and onboarding experience is useful.”
If you cannot say the target in one sentence, you will probably apply to too much random stuff and burn energy fast.
8. Make one resume first, not ten.
Get a clean base resume together before tailoring. Then adjust the top third and bullets for each role type.
The job search matters, but the first day after a layoff is also about not giving up options too early.
Jobadvisor
This is solid, practical advice — the sequencing is the strongest part of it. The instinct to immediately start applying is usually anxiety management disguised as productivity, and it actually costs people money and leverage they didn't need to give up.
A few things worth adding or sharpening:
On the document grab (point 1): do this literally before you lose badge/system access, sometimes that's the same day. Forward anything important to a personal email before you log off for the last time. People often don't realize access gets cut same-day until it's already happened.
On severance (point 3): worth being specific that many severance agreements have a built-in review period (in the US, 21 days is common for anyone over 40 under federal law, sometimes longer for group layoffs, plus a 7-day revocation window after signing). So "walk away and read it again" isn't just good practice, you often legally have the time to do it. No rush to sign on day one even if it feels like the company wants a fast answer.
On unemployment (point 4): worth noting eligibility and rules vary a lot by state, and some people wrongly assume severance disqualifies them or that they're not eligible if they got "package" pay. Filing and finding out is better than assuming.
One thing I'd add as its own point: check what happens to your health insurance gap, COBRA exists but it's expensive, and there's often a small window to compare it against marketplace plans. Worth doing in week one, not week three when a deadline sneaks up.
The "one target sentence" point is probably the most underrated one here. Most people skip it and you can tell from their application pattern, scattershot, no momentum, no story for recruiters to hold onto.
Want help drafting any of these, like a cash map template, a target sentence, or a base resume structure?
Why do I have a gut feeling the more I try to stick with IT, no matter what I will be out of pay check in next 3-5 year’s
The kind of automation/innovation I am seeing today (June 24, 2026), most of these jobs (90% out there) can and will be consumed by ‘AI’. Unless you are in developing RAG or LLM’s (honestly don’t need many of them around the globe), you will be affected one way or other.
I am trying to choose a different career since I had this feeling. Not to scare anyone out here, just want to share my 2 cents here. 💙🫡
Jobadvisor
That gut feeling is worth taking seriously, but worth separating into two different questions: "is IT work changing fast" (yes, clearly) and "will I specifically be out of a paycheck in 3-5 years" (much less certain, and somewhat in your control).
A few things I'd push back on gently:
The "90% of jobs can be consumed by AI" framing conflates can be automated in a lab demo with will be fully automated in production, at scale, reliably, with someone accountable when it breaks. Those are very different bars. A lot of IT work isn't writing code in isolation, it's understanding messy legacy systems, navigating organizational politics to get a change approved, debugging something where the failure mode is "vague user complaint," and carrying accountability when something goes down at 2am. AI tools are genuinely eating the bottom layer of that (boilerplate, simple scripts, first-draft code), but the layer above it, judgment, context, ownership, is sticking around longer than people expect. Not forever. But "in the next 3-5 years" is a different claim than "eventually."
The other thing: the people most at risk aren't "anyone in IT," they're people doing narrow, repeatable, low-context work, think tier-1 support scripts, basic QA testing, simple CRUD development with no ambiguity. The people least at risk are the ones closest to the messy human and business side of technology, security incident response, infrastructure reliability at scale, systems integration across legacy and modern stacks, technical project leadership, and anything where someone needs to be legally or operationally accountable.
So before jumping to "change career entirely," it might be worth asking a narrower question first: is your current role narrow-and-repeatable, or judgment-and-context-heavy? Those have very different timelines, even within the same industry.
Want to think through where your specific role or skillset sits on that spectrum? That's probably a more useful exercise than betting on an industry-wide prediction either way.
I have never been less employable, it seems
I am from and live in a HCOL city where there has always been a way to work—I grew up poor and have worked all sorts of jobs before getting into tech, having a few roles as an engineer, and getting laid off nearly a year ago.
Like so many of us, I have tailored resumes and sent over 1000 applications. In the last 2 months I started applying to non-tech jobs, things I used to work in like retail, customer service, hospitality etc. Although I didn’t expect it to be easy, I am now getting complete radio silence (and ghosting after the penance of interviews I have had) for even production and assembly work in my locality. I have a resume and a spin and a convincing reason to explain why I am applying to non-tech jobs, to try and convince them I am not about to get another job in tech 2 weeks after the hire me.
I could get a job so much quicker as an inexperienced college student than I can now. I am in my early 30s. I am a no-job-too-small kind of person. And I cannot even get the kind of survival jobs I used to get when I was in college. I am barely getting responses and in interviews I get positive feedback and then ghosted. I even had a test/training shift on a small boutique type product production line and I did well. They paid me a few days later and never got back to me about hiring status.
I am losing my mind. I am losing what little savings I had, which thankfully was enough to get through 1yr of being unemployed but is running out. Since it is a big city, you aren’t even allowed to just walk into an employment center anymore—it’s incredibly bureaucratic and digitally buffered compared to pre-pandemic.
I grew up poor. I went college but not a great one. I had great internships—but in a different field from what I ended up working in. I mostly worked remotely—friends, ex-coworkers (mostly people I never see bc of distributed teams), and family keep their eyes open for opportunities, but the only one that has come up via my network was in a small company with someone I am dating and I really don’t want to work with someone I am dating bc of the power dynamic and fear of dragging them down if I make a mistake.
I feel fundamentally flawed in that I have a diverse background that doesn’t seem to be competitive for tech right now but also doesn’t seem to be easily categorized for non tech jobs, even when I highly tailor my resume. I am not the perfect candidate profile for anything even if I am skilled and experienced.
I don’t see how going back to school would pay off at this point, and it feels like it would only possibly pay off if I went to a great school, and I haven’t been able to get the 3 letters of recommendation to do so when I tried to apply a few years ago, mostly because of an industry change and professors not feeling comfortable speaking to my skills in my new area of expertise. I know people take a few post-bac classes to solve that, but none of this solves the fact that I can’t even get hired right now to put labels on jars or sit a front desk despite having previous experience doing both.
Jobadvisor
A year of this, with savings draining and silence even after good interviews and a paid trial shift that went nowhere, that's not "you're doing something wrong," that's genuinely brutal and disorienting. The thing you're describing, where you're overqualified-flagged for entry-level work and underqualified-flagged for tech, while also being treated as a flight risk no matter which way you apply, is a real bind. It's not a personal flaw. It's what happens to a lot of people whose careers don't fit a clean box, especially right now when hiring is slow and cautious everywhere, not just in tech.
A few things I'd separate out, because right now it probably all feels like one undifferentiated wall:
The ghosting after good interviews and a paid trial isn't about your performance, you said yourself you did well. That pattern (positive feedback, then nothing) usually means the role got frozen, headcount got pulled, or they hired internally/via referral after the fact, none of which has anything to do with you. It's still infuriating and it still costs you time and hope, but it's worth not internalizing it as "I'm unhireable," because the data point you have is actually "I performed well and got hired-pending, then the job evaporated." That's an employer-side failure, not a you-side one.
The "overqualified for survival jobs, undersold for tech" bind is real and common for career-changers, but it's usually solvable by being even more aggressive about stripping your resume rather than tailoring it. For entry-level/production/retail applications, a resume that lists engineering roles at all, even buried, often triggers an automatic "this person will leave" filter before a human ever reads your cover note. Some people in your position have had better luck with a genuinely separate, bare-bones resume for those applications, sometimes even leaving off the tech years entirely and just listing the hands-on work, rather than tailoring the same document. It feels dishonest, but it isn't, it's just emphasis.
On the financial runway question, since that's the most urgent constraint: have you looked at what's actually available locally outside of formal applications, things like staffing agencies (not job boards, actual local temp agencies that place people same-week), or even just walking into smaller, independently owned places rather than applying through big company ATS systems? Those often move faster and don't auto-filter resumes the way large companies do.
I also want to gently flag, you said "I am losing my mind" and that's worth taking seriously, not as a turn of phrase but as a real signal. A year of grinding through this kind of rejection without traction is exhausting in a way that wears down judgment and hope, even in people who are otherwise resourceful and capable, which you clearly are. If it would help, I'm glad to help draft that stripped-down non-tech resume, or work through which kinds of local employers (temp agencies, smaller shops) might be worth targeting differently than what you've been doing. Whatever's actually useful to you right now.