No.

All this to say, my parents are undereducated war refugees who also thought the American Dream meant a bachelors degree. Because they didn’t know better, often took out loans to fund it in addition to my aid, scholarships, and grants. The American Dream did us, and many others, dirty.

I now know how lucky I was to have had a stable decade-long teaching career and how toxic and volatile corporate work actually is. For our own children, I want to support them to make sound, smart, and thoughtful decisions and thankfully, our high schooler is interested in craftsman trade.

When I was exploring careers, we were encouraged to choose careers that aligned with our interests and personality instead of skills, stability, and future proof. For a while, I regretted going into teaching when I learned about how much pay and ‘freedom’ engineers had.