A History Grad’s Fall into the Void

I walked across the stage—well, a Zoom stage, anyway—in May 2020, clutching my master’s degree in history like it was a ticket to somewhere. I was 26, brimming with theories about the socio-political fallout of the Tea Act and the kind of guy who could tell you what brand of tobacco Shakespeare might’ve smoked (probably something rough, imported from the New World). I thought the world needed that. I thought I’d be elbow-deep in archives, maybe teaching wide-eyed undergrads about the Articles of Confederation at some small liberal arts college. I was wrong. The world didn’t need historians. It needed ventilators, Zoom accounts, and people who could code apps to track toilet paper shortages.

The pandemic hit like a sledgehammer, and my carefully curated dreams of academia or museum work shattered on impact. I was living in a cramped one-bedroom in Philly’s Fishtown, splitting $1,600 rent with my roommate Jake, a poli-sci major whose Hill internship had vanished into the ether of “remote work.” My $40,000 student loan debt—thank you, Navient—was a guillotine blade hovering over my neck, with the six-month grace period ticking down like a bomb. To keep the lights on, I was working part-time at a diner near Temple University, slinging burgers and scrubbing ketchup stains for $12 an hour plus tips that were more like pocket lint. When the shutdowns came, the diner pivoted to takeout, but the vibe was grim. Customers stopped coming. Tips dried up. My boss, Tony, a chain-smoking Italian guy who’d been flipping pancakes since Reagan was president, got COVID in April and didn’t make it. His wife, Maria, tried to keep the place afloat but caught it too. By June, she was gone. I was pouring coffee for Uber drivers and delivery guys, trying not to think about the body count on the news.

Why Learn to Code in a Rust Belt Town?

Every night, I’d come home smelling like fryer grease, my sneakers caked in some unidentifiable diner sludge, and fire off resumes. Museums, historical societies, libraries, even random nonprofits with “heritage” in their mission statement—I applied to them all. I spent hours crafting cover letters, name-dropping historians like Gordon Wood or Jill Lepore to sound like I belonged. Nothing. Not a single reply. The academic job market, already a Hunger Games arena pre-COVID, was now a wasteland. I’d refresh my Gmail like it was a slot machine, hoping for a rejection, even, just to know someone had seen my name. Meanwhile, Twitter was a nightmare carousel of death tolls: “3,000 dead today.” “Hospitals at capacity.” “No end in sight.” I’d sit on our sagging Craigslist couch, nursing a warm Yuengling, scrolling until my eyes burned, wondering how I was supposed to pay rent when the world was falling apart.

History’s supposed to give you perspective. You read about the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, the Black Death—humanity’s been through worse, right? But knowing that didn’t make my $40,000 debt feel any less like a chokehold. I’d lie awake at night, running numbers in my head: $450 a month minimum payment once deferment ended, $800 for rent, $200 for groceries and utilities, and I was barely clearing $1,200 a month on a good week. Jake was in the same boat, his poli-sci degree as useless as my history one. We’d split $5 pizzas from the corner shop, joking about how we’d be eating Purina by 30. It wasn’t funny, but it was better than silence.

I started to hate my degree. Not history itself—I still got a thrill from reading about the Whiskey Rebellion or arguing that Hamilton was a self-aggrandizing hype man (fight me). But what was the point? The world didn’t need another essay on colonial tax policy. It needed ICU nurses, Amazon warehouse workers, and—apparently—people who could code. I felt like I’d spent six years and a small fortune learning to be irrelevant. My parents, back in Ohio, didn’t get it. My mom, a retired schoolteacher, would Zoom me with forced cheer: “Something will come up, honey.” My dad, a former auto mechanic, was less diplomatic: “Why’d you pick a major that doesn’t pay?” I didn’t have an answer, just a pit in my stomach.

The Coding Leap

By August, I was pulling double shifts at the diner, my hands raw from sanitizing tables every 20 minutes, my feet screaming from standing 12 hours straight. I’d come home, collapse onto my twin bed, and scroll job boards—LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster. Every listing was for software engineers, data analysts, or frontline workers. The history jobs? Vaporized. Museums were padlocked, universities were slashing adjuncts, and archives were “closed until further notice.” I applied to admin jobs, thinking my research skills could translate. No luck. Apparently, knowing how to cross-reference 18th-century tax records didn’t qualify me to answer phones.

October was my breaking point. Navient sent a letter, bold red text screaming that my payments started in 30 days. I had $183 in my checking account and a credit card I couldn’t pay off. I called them, voice shaking, begging for another deferment. The rep, some guy named Chad who sounded like he was reading from a script, offered income-based repayment: $300 a month instead of $450. I hung up, locked myself in the bathroom, and sobbed into a towel. The world was a meat grinder, and I was just another piece of gristle.

That’s when coding crept into my brain—not as a dream, but as a last resort. Jake’s cousin, a tech bro in Seattle, had been humble-bragging on Zoom about his six-figure job at a startup, coding in pajamas. I hated his smug face, but I was jealous. Tech was hiring when nothing else was. I googled “how to code” late one night, expecting a scam. Instead, I found stories of teachers, bartenders, even philosophy majors who’d taught themselves Python and landed jobs at Google or Shopify. I didn’t believe I could do it, but I was out of moves.

I found a free online bootcamp, one of those “learn to code in 12 weeks” deals that sounded like a late-night infomercial. I signed up, figuring I’d fail but at least I’d tried. The first few weeks were hell. I’d drag myself home from the diner, reeking of grease, and stare at my laptop until 2 a.m., trying to wrap my head around variables, loops, and syntax errors. It was like learning Latin, except every mistake crashed my program with a cryptic error message. I’d curse, slam my laptop shut, and wonder why I thought I could do this. But I kept going, because the alternative was worse: more diner shifts, more Navient letters, more nights wondering if I’d ever climb out of this hole.

My First Gig (and Crash)

By December, I could write basic scripts—a calculator that didn’t crash, a webpage that looked like it was designed in 1998 but worked. It wasn’t much, but it was something. For the first time in months, I felt a flicker of hope, like maybe I wasn’t doomed to scrub tables forever. That flicker drove me to the Wild West of freelance platforms: Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com. I pictured myself as a digital cowboy, lassoing gigs to pay my bills. The reality was less glamorous. Listings demanded “React wizards” or “full-stack unicorns” for $10 an hour. Others were outright scams—$500 to build an app “just like Uber.” I scrolled for hours, dodging red flags, until I found it: “Need simple WordPress site for local bakery. Basic theme setup, contact form, hours page. Budget: $150.”

$150. That was half my rent, a week of groceries, a dent in my phone bill. My heart raced. I’d tinkered with WordPress in the bootcamp, watched YouTube tutorials on PHP. How hard could it be? I wrote a proposal, faking confidence like I was pitching a dissertation: “Detail-oriented, fast learner, committed to delivering a professional site.” I hit send and refreshed my inbox like a maniac. When the notification pinged—“You’ve been awarded the project!"—I nearly spilled my diner coffee across the keyboard. Elation hit, then panic. This was real. Someone was paying me to code.

The client, Brenda, owned a bakery in South Philly. She seemed nice but frazzled, emailing me about her “vision” for a site to sell cupcakes and take orders. I nodded along on our Zoom call, scribbling notes, pretending I knew what “SEO-friendly” meant. Then came the hosting. Brenda had bought some cut-rate plan from a company I’d never heard of, and installing WordPress was like assembling IKEA furniture with half the screws missing. My terminal commands—carefully copied from tutorials—spat back errors like Permission denied and Database connection failed. I spent hours googling, tumbling down Stack Overflow rabbit holes, trying to decipher contradictory advice. My diner shifts bled into late-night coding sessions, my eyes burning from staring at code.

I finally got WordPress running. Victory, right? Wrong. The theme Brenda picked looked nothing like the demo. Text spilled over images, the menu clung to the left like a stubborn barnacle. I fumbled with CSS, half-remembering the difference between margin and padding. Every fix broke something else—fonts vanished, images stretched into pixelated nightmares. The contact form was worse. It needed to connect to Brenda’s Gmail for orders, but SMTP settings were a foreign language. I spent a whole night wrestling with plugins, testing emails that never arrived. Brenda’s emails grew sharper: “Any updates?” “My nephew says this should be easy.” “I need this by Friday.”

Friday came. I was a wreck, surviving on Red Bull and diner leftovers. I cobbled together a site—a lopsided, barely functional mess. The theme worked if you didn’t look too hard. The contact form sent emails… sometimes. It was amateur hour, but it was done. I sent Brenda the login, apologizing for “minor quirks” and blaming her hosting. I waited, refreshing Upwork, praying she’d approve.

She didn’t. Two days later, a notification: Dispute Filed. Brenda was livid. The site was “unusable,” the form “broken,” the design “cheap.” She couldn’t update her hours without the backend crashing. She wanted a refund. I wrote a frantic defense, citing her sketchy hosting and my “best efforts.” Upwork didn’t care. They sided with her. The $150 vanished, and my profile was slapped with a 1-star review: “Unreliable, didn’t deliver. Site is a mess. Avoid.” It felt like a public flogging. My one shot at breaking free, and I’d blown it.

That failure gutted me. The flicker of hope? Gone. I felt like a fraud, a history nerd playing pretend in a world that didn’t want me. My degree mocked me from the bookshelf, my diner apron mocked me from the closet. I didn’t touch my laptop for two weeks. The sight of VS Code made me want to puke. I went back to the diner, double shifts, the hum of the exhaust fan drowning out my thoughts. Navient kept sending letters, each one bolder, redder, meaner. The news was still a death march—vaccines were coming, but not fast enough, and the body count kept climbing. My failure felt like part of the world’s collapse, like I was just another casualty.

Picking Up the Pieces

But something wouldn’t let me quit. Maybe it was the same stubbornness that got me through 100-page theses on colonial governance. That review burned, but it was honest: I hadn’t delivered. I didn’t know enough—not just about code, but about clients, expectations, or how to turn a few tutorials into something real. Coding wasn’t just syntax; it was problem-solving, communication, reliability. Skills I’d honed in history—research, persistence, untangling complexity—weren’t useless. I just hadn’t used them right.

So I started again, slower, humbler. I found a better course, one that didn’t promise miracles but taught Git, debugging, and how to read error messages without panicking. I rebuilt Brenda’s site on a local server, fixing every issue she’d flagged. It took weeks, but it worked—clean, functional, not a masterpiece but not a disaster. I didn’t dare pitch it to her; it was for me, proof I could do better.

Spring 2021 came. Philly was thawing, the world was creaking open, but I was still stuck—diner by day, coding by night, debt collectors circling like vultures. I applied to jobs again, not dreaming of Google but aiming low: tech support, QA testing, anything with “junior” in the title. My portfolio was pathetic—a rebuilt bakery site (labeled “practice”), a weather app that crashed in Firefox, a to-do list that barely worked. Rejections piled up, but they stung less. Each one felt like a nudge: Keep going. You’re not there yet.

One day, a listing caught my eye: a tiny digital agency in Philly needed a “WordPress assistant” for $15 an hour, contract, no benefits. It was grunt work—updating plugins, fixing broken links, tweaking CSS for clients who didn’t know what CSS was. I applied, expecting nothing. To my shock, they called me for a Zoom interview. I wore my one clean button-up, sat in front of my bookshelf, and babbled about my “passion for problem-solving.” The interviewer, a tired woman named Sarah, didn’t care about my history degree but liked that I’d “messed around with WordPress.” A week later, I got the gig.

It wasn’t salvation. It was $15 an hour, 20 hours a week, fixing other people’s sloppy code. I was still at the diner part-time, still dodging Navient, still sharing $5 pizzas with Jake. But it was a crack in the door. I was in the room, hearing people talk about APIs and CRMs, learning what “technical debt” meant by swimming in it. Every plugin I fixed, every bug I squashed, felt like a tiny victory. I wasn’t a coder—not really—but I wasn’t just a history grad anymore either.

Looking back, 2020 didn’t just break me; it stripped me to the bone. That Upwork disaster wasn’t a detour; it was the map. It showed me that “knowing code” and “delivering value” are worlds apart. I’m not out of the woods. My debt’s still there, my job’s a grind, and I’m one bad client away from another 1-star review. But I’m moving, clawing forward, one debugged line at a time. History’s still my love—those dog-eared books on my shelf remind me who I am—but coding’s my fight. It’s not pretty, not heroic, just a slow, stubborn refusal to drown.

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