I usually hate man buns with a passion but hot damn does he look good with one ! <| sep |> Throwaway because I don ' t want this on my main , but still want to share . Tldr super introverted I worked my butt off , traveled across the United States and Australia , and went from cleaning floors to building rockets . I ' m a massive introvert , but because I wanted to go into aerospace engineering , I needed to go to a big school 10 , 000 students after graduating from a tiny high school under 50 in my year ' s graduating class . That was less than ideal . To put it in perspective , I ' ve put off taking required forms to HR before because I ' d feel super uncomfortable just talking to the person at the front desk for less than 30 seconds . It ' s irrational and frustrating in more ways than you ' d expect . I knew literally no one at the college and all but one of my friends scattered to different corners of the country after high school . So when I moved there , I basically followed my roommate everywhere . Didn ' t make any friends , but I could hang around and chime in enough to be an acquaintance . When you ' re in that summer camp period of the first few weeks of college , it ' s really easy to just be around people without needing to do anything . I eventually managed to make one friend and hung out with them a lot . This helped things tremendously and I met a couple more . However , outside of my few friends , I was still pretty much a shutin . I did homework , hung out with my 56 friends , and started writing a book . My parents were chipping in to help pay for tuition , but even with some scholarship money I still needed to take out loans to pay for college . I managed to get a job as a janitor and worked night shifts . When summer came around , I needed to find a new job . I hunted around , didn ' t find anything , and it got to the point where I literally just went to stripmalls and other places so I could walk store to store asking if they were hiring . I lucked out and managed to find a fastfood place that had recently opened and still needed people . Came in , filled out the form , manager asked me to come back the next day for an interview . Went to the interview and got hired on . I had successfully managed to get a job that would require me to talk to strangers for several hours a day . Suffice to say I didn ' t like it . When that summer finally ended , I went back to college and took the night job as a janitor again . Classes got harder since I was moving out of generals . Finally decided to join some student groups . Found one engineering group that I stuck with consistently . I started applying to internships , but no one was interested because I didn ' t have any skills that were useful . If I got an interview , I botched it . I kept working hard as a janitor and had my boss offer me a job over the summer . I took it and didn ' t need to go back to fast food . Meanwhile , at the engineering student group , I managed to get picked for a team that got to cross the continental united states . Year after that , I talked to a friend of mine about how she got her research job . I emailed a professor asking if he was looking for undergrads and he told me to check back next semester . I did and got an interview . We spent over an hour talking about drunk russians and physics and when I got up to leave he said as far as he was concerned I could ' consider myself a part of the project now '. Put in my notice as a janitor and became a physics researcher . Biggest benefit to the research job was flexible scheduling so I had almost total control over when I was working . During this time , the engineering student group was also under a massive time crunch . Competing in the US competition the year before put us behind schedule and we had to do designbuild for the international competition in Australia on a very short timeline . That was probably the most I ' ve ever worked . At times , I was putting in 40 hrsweek on the projectfor three weeks it was over 60 because composites are horrible to work with when you don ' t know exactly what you ' re doing , still doing research , and taking classes fulltime . I was picked to go with the team to compete in Australia , but i ' d have to take a month off during my senior year to do it . For my research job , my professor was fine with this and encouraged me to go . Classes were different though . I took some senior classes in my junior year and went to talk to the professors for the two that I ' d still need to miss a month for . The consensus was basically that I could maybe do one , but the other was not going to work out . Missing a month of senior lab and senior design was a terrible idea and I shouldn ' t do it . I registered anyway . I left for the competition . I spent a month overseas and drove across the entire continent of Australia . I came back and got caught up with senior design and senior lab . I got a 3 . 5 that semester . Like a lot of other people though , I was still having issues finding a job after graduation . I applied to around 300 custom cover letters and resumes for all positions and got two interviews . Botched both of them because I was so nervous I was shaking at times . Neither turned into an offer . Kept at it and finally got one where I ' m now a fulltime engineer working on space vehicle hardware . So that ' s my success story . Worked hard , found good people , learned from them , and was lucky enough for them to help me out at every step .