When I Realized I Was In The Wrong Career

20 Jul 2026 · 2 min

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In this personal narrative, the speaker reflects on the realization that a career in journalism no longer aligned with their desired lifestyle and values. They describe how declining job openings, low salaries, and a demanding deadline-driven environment prompted a reassessment. To find a better fit, they switched their major to psychology and used LinkedIn to research how others with psychology backgrounds built careers. After conducting numerous informational interviews, a conversation with a professional named Liz introduced them to human resources. The speaker evaluated both the positive and negative aspects of HR, finding that their strengths and resilience matched the role’s challenges. Concluding that HR was the career that could satisfy both their professional interests and lifestyle goals, they decided to pursue it.

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I knew that if I wanted to live a certain lifestyle, I would have to have a career that afforded me that. Well, as I worked in journalism, experienced it, and thought about my values, I realized these are misaligned. I was working deadline to deadline. Um, I looked at the open roles. They were declining year over year. The salaries would not be able to afford me certain lifestyles in these cities I wanted to live in. And I said, Am I going to set myself up for a career and a lifetime of work that meets, obviously, some of my interests, I obviously liked it, but I'd be giving up a lot. And there has to be other careers out there that could meet everything I just asked for. So here's what I did. I decided to change my major to psychology. Go onto LinkedIn, I type in the word psychology, 'cause I think, Who in my network and extended network got psychology degrees and what did they do with it? So I built this whole list and I talked to all of them. I reached out to them, asked them for their time, and they were so gracious to talk to me. None of them quite fit what I was looking for until I spoke with a woman named Liz. Talked to her and she had a job title, something along the lines of Human resources, human resources manager or something like that. I did not really know what human resources was at this point, but I sat down with her and I learned about the best parts of working in human resources. And I said, whoa, those all played my strengths. And then I learned about the worst parts of human resources, which there are plenty, and those all played my strengths. All were ways that I was very resilient, and I knew the worst days in that job, I could master it. And so I thought, wow, I found it. This is what I'm going to do.