u/tikesav

Last fall I woke up at 2am convinced I was having a heart attack.

Ended up in the ER hooked up to monitors while my brain was going completely off the rails. After all the tests, the doctor came back and said my heart was fine. Probably a panic attack. Then he asked what I do for work.

I said I’m a teacher and he literally gave me this exhausted little “yeah, that makes sense” sigh. That honestly messed with me more than anything else.

Before that night, I kept telling myself I was just tired. Just stressed. Just needed to survive testing season or conferences or observations or whatever fresh hell was happening that month.

Meanwhile I was sitting in my car before school trying to talk myself into going inside. My watch kept warning me about high heart rate while I was sitting at my desk doing attendance.

I cried at the dentist when they asked if I’d been stressed lately. Sundays started feeling terrifying instead of relaxing. I was sick constantly too. Strep, sinus infections, random stomach problems.

And admin somehow still found ways to make everything worse. Emails late at night about why a kid dropped two points. Constant “supportive” observations that felt like surveillance. Being told behavior problems were about “relationship building” while kids were throwing things across the room.

That ER visit finally snapped something in me. I remember laying there thinking, if one of my students told me their job was making them physically sick like this, I’d tell them to leave immediately. But somehow teachers are supposed to just keep absorbing it.

After that I stopped treating quitting like some moral failure and started treating it like a health issue. I talked to my doctor and therapist instead of only talking to other burned out teachers. I made a depressing little spreadsheet with bills, savings, insurance, and jobs I could tolerate temporarily. Seeing the numbers helped more than I expected.

I also started trying to figure out who I even was outside teaching because I’d wrapped my entire identity around it. I dumped a bunch of thoughts into notes apps, old evaluations, random career stuff, even did a Coached career assessment because I needed something to help me sort through the mess in my head and see patterns I wasn’t noticing on my own.

I ended up taking a part-time retail job after leaving. Huge pay cut. Not glamorous at all. But I sleep through the night now. My chest doesn’t hurt driving to work. If somebody is rude, I don’t have to stand there managing 30 other human beings at the same time pretending everything is normal.

I still miss parts of teaching sometimes. Mostly the kids. But I don’t miss feeling like my body was falling apart every single week and everyone around me acting like that was just part of the job.

So I’m in my last year of a Data Science degree and I’ve started noticing that nobody really seems to agree on what a “Data Science degree” even means.

A couple hiring managers have basically said “wait, so is this more stats or more CS?” and honestly fair question.

My program isn’t bad. We did calc, linear algebra, probability, regression, time series, ML, databases, data mining, all the expected stuff. But a lot of it feels weirdly shallow. Like we touched 12 ML models in one semester and barely implemented anything beyond toy examples. Our databases course spent more time on theory than actually wrestling with ugly SQL tables. Software engineering was basically “here’s how to write scripts that work on your laptop.”

Meanwhile I look at alumni who landed the stronger DS jobs and a ton of them came from CS, math, or stats backgrounds.

So now I’m sitting here wondering if I need to “fix” the signal before I graduate. Not because I think I learned nothing, but because I’m starting to understand how the degree gets read by recruiters.

Part of me is considering a CS post-bacc just so nobody questions whether I can code. Another part of me thinks a stats master’s would fit better since I’m more interested in analytics/experimentation than hardcore ML engineering.

Then there’s the third option where I stop obsessing over credentials and just get better at the stuff I already know I’m weak at. Better SQL. Better Python. Less Kaggle-y projects, more stuff that actually looks like something a company would use.

I already rewrote my resume because the first version sounded like a syllabus exploded onto a PDF. I ran it through resumeworded mostly to trim the fluff and make the projects sound less academic. It helped a bit, but I still feel like the bigger issue is proving I can do real work and not just pass classes.

Honestly the thing messing with my head is that I can’t tell if I’m overthinking this or seeing the market clearly for the first time. Like… is “B.S. Data Science” actually viewed differently from CS/stats once you’re applying, or does nobody care after the first internship?

My docs used to die in the comments.

Someone asks for an edge case. Someone else disagrees. Two days later it’s 18 replies deep and nobody remembers what decision we’re even trying to make.

I didn’t fix this by writing “better PRDs.” i fixed it by changing the rules of engagement.

What i do now:

- Every doc gets a 5-line “Decisions needed” block at the top. Literal bullets. If a comment doesn’t map to one of those, it goes to Parking Lot.

- I reply with a label first:

[FIX] I changed X, please re-check.

[DECISION] Need your call between A/B by Thursday.

[PARK] Captured for later.

[QUESTION] I need more detail (and i ask ONE question, not three).

People stop debating when it’s obvious what bucket they’re in.

- I don’t resolve comments until the change is merged into the doc.

Resolving is my “closed loop” signal. Otherwise you end up with the same note coming back in the meeting because it still looks open.

- For anything contentious: i pull it out of comments and into a short table in the doc:

Option | Pros | Cons | Decision | Owner | Date

If it’s worth arguing about, it’s worth making scannable.

- I set a comment SLA.

48 hours for review. After that, new comments are “next iteration unless it blocks a decision.” (Yes, some people hate this. It’s still better than the doc lingering for 3 weeks.)

Weirdly, this also made my perf writeups easier because i can point to a before/after (“doc cycle time dropped from X to Y”). When i’m translating that into bullets, i’ll draft in a scratch doc and run it through Grammarly/Resumeworded just to tighten the wording, then i’m done.

Do you have any tricks for getting senior folks to stop using comments as a debate club and start using them to make decisions?

Every time I think about changing jobs, my brain goes straight to the worst-case scenario. I start spiraling that if a new role sucks, that’s two years wasted, which ruins my trajectory, and suddenly I'm frozen. People call me "stable," but honestly, it feels more like I’m just pure risk-paralyzed.

To actually make a move, I stopped treating job changes like forever decisions. Now I just ask myself if the move is a decent bet for the next 12 to 18 months. I also stick to a hard list of dealbreakers and stay flexible on the rest so I don't auto-reject things.

I keep a running evidence log of things I’ve accomplished just to remind myself I'm actually good at what I do. Dumping that list into the Coached career test really helped me figure out what actually energizes me without overcomplicating it.

Before taking anything new on, I literally put a future review date on my calendar. Having a built-in exit ramp makes it way less terrifying to say yes. And when the doom spiral hits, I just remind myself that if it sucks, I'll just update my resume and move on. It’s not the end of the world.

How do other ISTJs handle this? Do you have a process to avoid analysis hell, or do you just take the leap and figure it out?

Aight so for a solid year, my resume basically just screamed "map nerd, entry-level only" and I was too close to it to even see the problem.

I had all the usual stuff (ArcGIS, QGIS, SQL, some Python) but my apps went absolutely nowhere unless the job title was literally "GIS Tech." I was stuck.

I finally figured out that my resume was organized around software, not actual problems. Writing "Created maps in ArcGIS" is what every single student does. Hiring managers don't care about the tool; they care if you made permitting faster or saved the company money. I was also letting my "Intern" and "Tech" titles box me in. I started using hybrid headers like "GIS / Data Analyst" because, honestly, half my work was just junior data dev stuff anyway.

The biggest shift was rewriting my bullets to stop sounding like lab instructions. Instead of "Digitized parcels," I went with "Cleaned 30k address points in PostGIS, cut returned-mail rate by 18%." It's a total game changer when you show an actual result.

I eventually just sat down with a stack of job postings and Resumeworded open to see why I wasn't getting hits. It was a massive reality check on my formatting and keywords. It helped me realize my "homework" style descriptions were killing my chances, so I used it to score my rewrites until the impact actually popped.

I ended up with three versions of my resume: one for classic GIS, one for Data Analysis, and one for Geo-Dev. I didn't lie about anything. I just moved the projects around based on what the posting actually asked for. Suddenly, I was getting calls for Data Analyst and even Junior Dev roles.

How are you guys framing yourselves lately? Are you "GIS first," or are you a "Data Person" who just happens to be a wizard with maps?