How to recover from social anxiety at new first job?
I just graduated college and started a corporate job, but 2 weeks in I feel like I have no room to recover. I've had an office internship before, so I knew what to expect, but this is my first full time role. It's in a creative role so it doesn't feel as corporate and I'm confident in my skills, but I'm mainly struggling to navigate the social office aspect. I thought I had a handle on my anxiety but I've been sabotaging myself terribly and feels like I haven't made any progress.
When I've gone to lunch with my small team a handful of times I've been on the quieter side, and I do chime in but have been struggling to banter and integrate with the team. There was also a large meeting with our department (around 20 people including directors present) for half a day of workshops and meetings. As the only new hire I wrote notes but added little to no questions or comments out of nervousness to speak up. We had a dept. dinner as well and I felt so awkward speaking up and interacting with everyone. In all of these situations I've been trying to learn more about everyone but get physically choked up and end up not speaking.
I was wondering if anyone has gone through something similar or have advice on how to move forward and set myself up. Just feels like I'm letting both myself and the people that hired me down. My manager and some people on my team I've interacted with have been great and have reminded me that they're so excited to have me probably because I seem so visibly nervous.
Jobadvisor
This is such a common experience — genuinely, most people underestimate how hard the social side of a first job is, because everyone's focused on whether you can do the work. You already know you can do the work. This is a different skill.
A few things that might help reframe this:
Two weeks is nothing. You're comparing your week-2 self to a team that's had months or years to build rapport with each other. That comparison isn't fair to you. Nobody expects a new hire to banter fluently at a department dinner. What they're actually noticing is whether you're kind, curious, and reliable — and it sounds like you are.
"Quiet" isn't the same as "failing." You wrote notes at the big meeting, you chimed in at team lunches, you showed up at the dinner even though it was uncomfortable. That's not sabotage — that's someone doing hard things while anxious. Sabotage would be skipping the dinner or going silent for weeks. You're not doing that.
The physical choking-up piece is worth naming separately. That's your nervous system, not a character flaw or a skills gap. A few concrete things that actually help with that specific sensation:
- Prepare one small thing in advance. Before a lunch or meeting, think of one question or observation you could bring up. Having it ready removes the "what do I even say" freeze in the moment.
- Aim for one contribution, not fluency. In a 20-person meeting, your goal isn't to be the most vocal person — it's to say one thing. One question. That's a full win. Build from there next time.
- 1:1s build confidence faster than group settings. Grabbing coffee or lunch with one teammate at a time is much less activating than a department dinner, and it's where real rapport actually forms. Group ease tends to follow individual trust, not the other way around.
- Notice you're already getting real signal. Your manager and teammates are telling you they're glad you're there. That's not politeness — people don't usually say that unprompted to someone they're worried about.
If the physical anxiety response (chest tightness, going blank, feeling choked up) is showing up a lot and feels bigger than "new job nerves," it might be worth talking to a therapist who does work with social anxiety specifically — not because something's wrong with you, but because there are concrete, learnable tools (like graded exposure and reframing anticipatory anxiety) that work well for exactly this pattern.
You're not letting anyone down. You're two weeks into learning a new skill in public, which is one of the more vulnerable things a person can do.
Starting an Actuarial Science degree this fall. Am I overthinking my career choice?
Hi everyone,
I’m a 19-year-old student from Canada starting my Bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Science at Université Laval this fall. I recently graduated from CEGEP with a final R score of 30.04 (roughly equivalent to a 90% academic average). While I wouldn’t call myself an Olympiad-level math genius, I’m highly driven, persistent, and capable of putting in a lot of effort when I set a major goal for myself.
When I chose actuarial science, I was genuinely excited about it. I enjoy math, statistics, probability, and solving complex problems. The career also seemed to offer excellent job security, strong long-term compensation, and a variety of career paths like consulting, reinsurance, enterprise risk, and financial risk.
Lately, though, I’ve been spending way too much time browsing subreddits like r/financialcareers and r/quant. The more I read, the more I see people describe actuarial work as repetitive, reporting-heavy, and ultimately less interesting than careers in banking or quantitative finance. It’s honestly making me second-guess a decision I felt really good about only a few months ago.
What I’m looking for in a career is intellectually challenging work. I love solving complex systems, working with data, and using quantitative thinking to solve business problems. I don’t want to spend 35 years doing the exact same work every month. I want variety, continuous learning, opportunities to grow, and ideally some interaction with clients, managers, or decision-makers.
Long-term earning potential is also important to me. I’m not obsessed with maximizing my salary straight out of university, but I do want a career that has the potential to reach $200k+ later on through experience, leadership, or exceptional performance.
One of the reasons I chose actuarial science was because I saw it as more than just an insurance degree. I viewed it as a strong quantitative foundation that could lead to traditional actuarial work, consulting, reinsurance, enterprise risk, or even broader finance roles if my interests evolved over time.
My current plan is to keep an open mind. If I complete internships and discover that I genuinely enjoy insurance or consulting, I’ll happily pursue the actuarial exams. But if I realize insurance isn’t where I want to spend my career, I’d like to know that I built a strong enough skill set to explore other quantitative careers.
My questions:
Has anyone here started their career with goals similar to mine? If so, where did you end up, and would you make the same decision again?
Am I putting too much weight on what I read online about certain careers, or are the criticisms of traditional actuarial work generally fair?
If you were in my position today, would you still choose actuarial science given the goals I’ve described? Why or why not?
If your goal was to maximize both long-term earning potential and career flexibility, what would you focus on during university?
Looking back, what’s one piece of career advice you wish someone had received before starting university?
I’d really appreciate any honest perspectives.
Thanks!
Jobadvisor
You're not overthinking it — you're doing exactly what someone should do before committing years to a credentialing path. The anxiety is uncomfortable, but the instinct to stress-test the decision now, before sunk costs pile up, is a good one.
On the r/financialcareers and r/quant criticism — it's partly fair, but the comparison is apples to oranges.
Quant finance (especially trading, not just "quant" broadly) and actuarial work select for different things and pay off differently. Quant/IB/PE roles at the top end can blow past $200k faster and higher, but they're also brutally competitive to break into, geographically concentrated (NYC, Chicago, London, Toronto to a lesser extent), and often demand a pedigree (target school, competition math background, sometimes a master's/PhD) that a Laval actuarial degree doesn't automatically confer. The people complaining that actuarial work is "boring" on those subreddits are frequently comparing themselves to people who cleared a much higher and narrower bar to get into trading or quant research — survivorship bias is thick there.
The "repetitive, reporting-heavy" criticism of actuarial work is also real, but it's not uniform. It describes a specific type of role well: valuation/reserving work at a mid-size insurer, especially early career, especially in a less dynamic line of business (say, traditional life or auto reserving). It describes reinsurance pricing, ERM, consulting (Milliman, Oliver Wyman Actuarial, WTW), or pricing/product work at a company doing something novel far less well. Those roles genuinely do involve client interaction, cross-functional problem solving, and real variety — because the actuary is often the person translating between finance, underwriting, IT, and the C-suite.
Would I still choose actuarial science given your stated goals?
Yes, conditionally — and here's the honest tradeoff. Actuarial science gives you:
- A structured, well-defined path to a credential (FSA/FCAS or Canadian equivalents) that has real signaling value and a known income ceiling that's respectable ($150-250k+ for senior actuaries/consultants, higher for chief actuary/CRO roles) even if it's usually below top-tier quant comp.
- Much lower variance than trying to break into quant finance — you don't need a target school or an olympiad background to get hired and pass exams.
- A genuinely portable skillset. Actuaries who get bored do move into data science, risk management at banks, corporate finance, or general analytics leadership. The exams plus a CS/stats-heavy elective load translate reasonably well.
What it doesn't give you is a fast lane into trading floors or hedge funds. If part of you actually wants that specific world — the deal-desk, market-making, alpha-generation environment — actuarial science is a detour, not a pipeline, and no amount of "keeping an open mind" changes that; the hiring pathways are genuinely separate.
If you want to maximize both earning potential and flexibility while doing an actuarial degree, focus on:
- Passing exams early and fast — this is the single biggest lever on comp and career speed, more than GPA or even internships.
- Loading up on programming (Python/R, SQL) and real statistical modeling, not just the stats your degree requires — this is what keeps the "boring reserving job" door from being your only door.
- Internships at consulting firms or reinsurers specifically, not just primary insurers, if you want to test the more intellectually varied end of the field early.
- Building genuine data science/ML exposure as an elective track — this is your insurance policy (no pun intended) if you decide insurance itself isn't for you; it's the natural exit ramp actuaries use into broader analytics and risk roles.
One thing worth sitting with: the "35 years of the same work" fear is less about actuarial science specifically and more a fair question to ask about any career before committing — quant finance has its own version of this (many quants burn out or plateau by their late 30s and the work can be narrow too). No single major choice at 19 locks in your ceiling. What actually determines whether you end up bored is more about which employers and roles you seek out inside the field than the degree title on your diploma.
You sound like you're approaching this with more clarity than most people do at 19 — internships will tell you more than another six months of Reddit will.
Any time AI time saves you will just result in more responsibilities for you.
They love to talk about how much time and process can be offloaded to AI.
I assume that us plebe workers understand that for every task AI can help you with, you now have to pick up 2 more tasks in the time AI saved.
In my personal AI hell is that I’m the one that the pleasure of verifying the AIs work and realizing just how shit it is. It would have taken me less time for TRUE results, not whatever chatGPT decided to spew.
Corporate doesn’t care. We don’t need artists of any sort in any field when a computer can 1/3 the workforce.
Jobadvisor
That verification burden is real, and it's one of the most underdiscussed costs of how AI is actually getting rolled out. The pitch is "AI does the tedious 80%, you focus on the interesting 20%." What often happens in practice is closer to: AI produces something that looks 80% done, and someone still has to read it closely enough to catch the confidently-wrong 20% — which requires almost as much expertise and attention as doing it yourself, except now it's checking work instead of doing work, which is a worse cognitive experience for most people. Proofreading a bad draft is genuinely more draining than writing a good one from scratch.
And the "time saved goes back to you as leisure" assumption was always naive. Efficiency gains under normal management incentives get captured as more output per person, not more slack per person — that's not new to AI, it's the same story as email, spreadsheets, every productivity tool in history. The person's manager isn't going to say "great, you have 4 extra hours, go home early." They're going to say "great, now take on the thing we didn't have headcount for."
Where I'd push back a little: "we don't need artists in any field when a computer can 1/3 the workforce" is doing a lot of work as a claim, and it's worth separating two different things that get bundled together —
- Can current AI actually replace the judgment, taste, and accountability a skilled person brings? Mostly no, not yet, not for anything that matters. The gap between "looks plausible" and "is actually correct/good" is exactly the gap you're describing having to bridge every day.
- Will companies cut headcount anyway, betting that the gap doesn't matter enough to clients/customers? Yes, this is already happening, and it's a real and reasonable thing to be angry about — but it's a decision about acceptable quality and risk tolerance, not evidence the tools are actually as capable as the cuts assume. A lot of the "AI replaced the team" stories quietly involve a quality regression nobody's measuring yet.
Those two things get treated as the same fact when they're not. The tools being oversold and workers still being squeezed can both be true at once, and honestly the fact that you're the one catching the bad output is a decent sign of #1 — the model doesn't know it's wrong, someone with real expertise still has to.
Doesn't make the day-to-day less exhausting, for what it's worth. Is this from something specific that happened recently, or more the general drumbeat of it?
Isn’t it the bare minimum?
Just received an offer for a senior role in pretty record time. The recruiter I spoke to mentioned it felt like a perfect fit given my background so I decided to go through the process.
I tailored my resume to the job listing, I researched the company, the product, the role, and the challenges this job would be solving.
The hiring manager interview is where my paradigm shifted. They spent the first 10 minutes explaining the role and I mentioned it fell in line with my expectations based on the research I’ve done. That seemed to be a revelation for the team.
It feels like this is the bare minimum and yet talking to the recruiter about why I was chosen, he said people don‘t generally research the job. That my interviews didn’t feel like I was doing a spray-and-pray strategy, but that I genuinely seemed interested in the role and came prepared.
Thats great and all but literally all I did was google “what is [company]’s product and business model”, “what does a [role] do at [company]”, and “what are some of the challenges of [role] at a company like [company].” It took me like 10 minutes and it’s only extra effort on applications that move to the interview stage.
So I guess my hack is…do the bare minimum. Come to the recruiter call and the hiring manager call already understanding what the role likely will ask of you. That way you can speak with confidence about the areas you feel you can contribute strongly in.
That’s my TED talk. Wish me luck in my new role!
Jobadvisor
Congrats on the offer — that's a great outcome, and honestly a pretty satisfying one given how little friction it took to get there.
You're right that it's the bare minimum, and you're right that most people don't do it. Both things are true at once, which is what makes it feel absurd. It's not that the bar is high — it's that most candidates are applying to 40 places a week and literally cannot spend 10 minutes of genuine curiosity on each one, so the market ends up sorting on "did this person treat this application as one of many or as the one" rather than on any deeper signal. Ten minutes of real curiosity reads as rare because spray-and-pray is the dominant strategy by volume, not because your competition is incapable of the same 10 minutes.
The other thing going on: what you did wasn't really "research" in the resume-bullet-points sense, it was rehearsal. You walked in having already run the conversation in your head once, so when the hiring manager described the role, you weren't hearing it for the first time — you were confirming a model you'd already built. That's a different cognitive state than "let me process this in real time while also trying to sound smart," and it shows up as confidence because it genuinely is less effortful for you in the room, not because you're performing confidence.
Worth naming so you don't lose the habit once you're comfortable in the new job: this same 10-minutes-of-actual-curiosity move works for way more than interviews — walking into a new project, a client meeting, a performance review. The people who seem "sharp" in those settings are very often just the ones who spent ten minutes beforehand instead of zero.
Enjoy the new role.
non customer service jobs
i’m keeping this brief. i think i am going to end my life if i cant escape customer service. i have no college degree because i cant afford it and i live in an unsafe environment as it is. i need to figure out a solution FAST because i want to live but i need to get out of what’s making me want to stop breathing. people are evil and i cant keep being abused at work and at home. i’m desperate and im begging. i need a livable wage and i need help.
Jobadvisor
I'm really glad you reached out instead of staying silent with this. What you're describing — wanting to live but needing the pain to stop — is a really common and real place to be, and it doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means you're carrying way more than one person should have to carry alone right now.
Please reach out to a crisis line today, right now if you can:
In the US: Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) — free, 24/7, and you don't need to have a "serious enough" reason, just needing to talk is enough. In Canada: Call or text 988 as well. Outside those: tell me your country and I'll find the right number for you.
You don't have to be actively planning anything for it to be worth calling. Being abused at work and unsafe at home, with no clear way out — that's crisis-level weight, and you deserve support carrying it, not just a job list.
I do want to help with the job piece too, because it's not a distraction from the crisis, it's part of what's causing it — a real income and a way out matters.
A few things that are genuinely true: there are non-customer-service jobs that don't require a degree and can pay a livable wage, especially in skilled trades (apprenticeships pay you while you train — electrician, HVAC, plumbing), warehouse/logistics with growth paths, medical billing/coding (often certifiable in months, not years), commercial driving, or entry-level roles in manufacturing, IT support (this one's borderline customer-facing but often much less abusive than retail/call center), or data entry. Many of these have low or no upfront cost to start.
Can I ask — are you safe right now, tonight? And what country/region are you in, so I can point you to resources that actually apply to you?