Family Feuds·
THE TRADE PATH DILEMMA
A new graduate debates college, military, and trade paths, faces relentless family pressure, and quietly weighs plumbing as a practical, hands-on option while still seeking direction.
What should they choose next?
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Barely a month out of graduation, a newly minted high school graduate is already getting the same question on repeat: what now? The answer, for this poster, is brutally simple, they do not know.
Fresh out with an A/B average and a 3.8 GPA, they say "school is not for me" and they do not want to go to college. That has not stopped their family from pushing hard. At home, the pressure comes wrapped in the same warning over and over: "you have to have a plan." And in their family, that usually means the military.
The poster says military service keeps coming up because their mom's side has a long line of military members. So they tried to check it out for themselves. They took the ASVAB and scored a 56, then brought it to the Air Force office. Instead of encouragement, they got brushed off by the woman there, and it stuck with them. The military was never their first choice anyway.
For a while, they thought they had found something else. They were set on mortuary school. But after doing the research, they found out that in their state morticians do not make a livable wage unless they own a funeral home, something they cannot afford. That door shut too.
Now they are looking somewhere else entirely: plumbing. They say they have been searching for plumbing internships because they cannot find an apprentice class that is not already full. The appeal is practical and immediate. Plumbers "never run dry of a job," they say, the pay is decent, and the work is hands-on, the kind of work they actually want.
That has not made the search any easier. Family members keep shutting down the idea, calling it "a man's job." The poster says that kind of reaction is exactly what they have been running into, whether they suggest plumbing or any other trade path that is not the one their family expects.
For now, they are still working the same part-time job they have had for almost three years, while applying for higher-wage work and trying to find a trade program that fits. They are not sitting still; they are searching, applying, comparing options, and trying to build something from scratch.
But the frustration is still there. "I don't know what to do with my life," they write, sounding less like someone refusing to move and more like someone staring at too many dead ends at once.