No Masters Degree? No Connections? No Job! Living In Seattle. 

Seattle, Seattle. What a beautiful and peaceful place. I’ve never seen such amazing landscapes. The Olympic Peninsula is one magical and truly breathtaking place. You haven’t seen a sunset until you visit Whidby Island. I moved to Kirkland in the summer of 2016 with intentions of making it big. Most people go to LA to pursue their dreams. Not me. I left LA and went to Seattle thinking I could become a video game screen writer. What started out as a brand new and hopeful journey ended with disappointment and $20,000 in debt. How, you ask? It’s simple really, rent was $1,800 for a 700 square foot one bed room apartment. The only job a college graduate could seem to get was $14 an hour retail job at the Bellevue mall. It was, at the least, discouraging.

Every job I applied to, every interview I went on was useless. I was fresh out of college. No connections. No money. No experience. All I had was my bachelors and I soon learned that wasn’t enough.

For the first few months, I dedicated my time to applying. I would search and apply for jobs from sun up to sun down. I wanted to write the scripts for games and I knew I was gong to do it. It only made sense, I thought video games were rad and I had a bachelors degree in screenwriting. Why wouldn’t I be hired? Oh, sweet, little, naive, twenty something year old, Scarlett. Why would I be hired, is the better question. Seattle is now built on a employment system of nepotism and PhDs. Unless you have a masters degree in computer science or can design a high functioning computer software, you’re pretty useless to the Seattle job market. Most people who get in to any sort of decent paying job either have a high level degree or they know someone who knows someone who is Bill Gate’s cousin’s friend. This isn’t just me and my bitter experience with Seattle. This is what I was also told by locals when I happen to open up about my job search sorrows. Bu then again, I have the right to be bitter about my experience in getting a job in Seattle.

Not only did I sit in traffic for an hour to every day just to go five blocks, but I got more automated rejected emails from every gaming employer in the pacific north west. Every email that started with “Thank you for your application, but we have decided to move forward with other candidates…” was a dagger to my ego. Yet every time I opened an email, I remained hopeful. I had a part time job at the mall. I soon began to notice that my co-workers were all trying to get corporate jobs like me. They had their degrees and applied daily to various jobs. Maybe not for gaming companies, but in software development or something related to computer science. Yet, there they were working at a mall. Then I learned that the Starbucks barista, the valet attendant, the waitress, the AT&T sales men, ALL were trying to get a job just like me. I was competing with everyone in the entire city of Seattle to get a job. What made it worse was that Amazon, Google, T-Mobile, and other big name companies were bringing in people from India and Asia to work for them. Not only would they offer an outrageous salary, but they would put them up. In extremely nice apartments. This surge made the rental market for housing burst through the roof. Hence, why I was paying $1,800 for a small apartment OUTSIDE of the city… and it was considered a ‘good deal‘.

I finally got a job working for a start up company. They made a simulation game for real estate agents in need of continuing education hours. I was pretty excited considering it was still a gaming company. I was a marketing assistant to a freelance marketing director. I was suppose to learn from this person and end up running the marketing department. As least that’s what I was told. Except this freelance marketing director was never at work. I maybe saw her one to two days a week for about an hour if I was lucky. So when the numbers were low in the marketing arena, all the C suite executives looked to me. A person with absolutely no marketing experience and zero ability to bullshit my way through any meeting. Not wanting to throw the marketing director under the bus, I took the hit… every time. Eventually I was laid off due to funding problems and back luck. Luckily their was a company that shared an office with us. The COO, saw potential in me and decide to take me on. Only he didn’t really have any work for me. So for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I looked up potential clients on Intellus and put them in a spreadsheet. I just about lost my mind.

There was one day, I will never forget. We had an intern, a young Indian kid. He was going to school at the University of Washington, studying law, and he would come to work for about 3 hours after his classes. He was kind of a smug kid. Tall and lanky. Wore jeans that were too big and oversized sweatshirts. The COO wanted us to get together in the conference room and discuss the agenda for an upcoming trip the executives were having. We did just that, at the end of the meeting he ask me something. He said, “where do you want to be with this job?”. I didn’t quite know how to respond. To me that job was a place holder until I could find something better. But what was that? Where was I headed? I replied, “I’m not sure, I’m just trying to get some experience on my resume at this point.” He said, “aren’t you like 24? Shouldn’t you already have experience on your resume?”. Told you, smug kid. He then went on to say, “I mean I’m studying law and I know exactly what I want to be. I already have my job lined up once I get out of college and I’m only 19…. I just want to know how… why… where did you go wrong?” I stared at the kid, unable to answer. I was dumbfounded and extremely hurt, because I use to think that about people when I was in college. When I was 18 or 19, I thought I had it all figured out. I would never become a ‘loser’ who didn’t know what they wanted or where they are going. Yet there I sat, the ‘loser’, in a conference room with a 19 year old asking me where I went wrong. I should have responded with, “I didn't realize a 24 year old could have lived long enough to, ‘go wrong’”. Instead, I just said the only thing that came to mind, “I don’t know”. And to tell you the truth I really didn’t know. What dream was I chasing? Did I really want to write scripts for a video game company. Did I even like video games to begin with? What was I doing?

That was the last straw. I had, had it with Seattle. I couldn’t catch a break and as I mentioned earlier the debt was accumulating quickly.

I was offered another retail job for a lot more money. Except this retail job was in Idaho. I jumped on it. I couldn't look at another spread sheet with random names to verify on Intellus one more day. In less than three weeks, I packed my bags and left Seattle and all the scenic beauty and my devastating job experiences with it.