I get it. We're international students. Non-resident aliens. Our degree isn’t just a degree; it’s a ticket. And the golden ticket, we’re told, is STEM.
Computer Science. Data Science. It doesn’t matter if you love it. What matters is that it grants you the holy grail: STEM OPT. Three whole years to find a sponsor, to secure a future. It feels like we don’t have a choice. So we sign up. We double-major in Data Science not for the passion, but for the prefix. The goal isn’t mastery; it’s the checkbox. And "chat" is the tool of choice to check it—completing assignments, scraping through classes, using the very technology that's tightening the grip on the jobs we're chasing.
We’re using a shadow of the problem to avoid building a solution within ourselves. The tool we use to fake competence is the very thing redefining competence beyond our reach.
The plan is to get the paper, get the OPT, and figure the rest out later.
But the “later” is here, and it’s a ghost town.
Companies are laying off en masse. Entry-level jobs are a myth. There’s a brutal, short-sighted logic taking over: why hire and train a junior developer when you can pile the work onto a senior or automate the basics away?
This is the crack in the foundation. We’ve been told our problem is a time problem. But it’s not. It’s an employability problem.
Let’s be blunt: if you can’t get a job within the first 90 days of your standard OPT, the 24-month STEM extension is a theoretical fantasy. It doesn’t matter. The 90-day unemployment clock is a brutal reality check. You can have three years of work authorization, but if your skills are subpar, if you have no passion for the work, if you’re just another resume in a stack of thousands, you have zero days. The clock runs out.
We’ve been sold a lie that more time is the solution.
And this is where it gets uncomfortable. Maybe we all know this deep down. There’s a comfort in the collective delusion, in keeping our heads down and following the trend.
“To be overly conscious is a sickness. A real, thorough sickness.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sometimes I wonder if that’s my problem. This over-awareness. Is it better to just ignore the sinking feeling? To not question the path, to blissfully chase the STEM OPT dream without thinking about the cliff at the end? The people who can do that seem happier, at least for a while. They aren’t screaming into the void about a collapsing market and a flawed strategy.
But if you’re like me, and you can’t unsee it, the trap is all you can see. The gamble is laid bare: if you get the job you hate, you’re signing up for a life of burnout. If you don’t get the job, you’ve wasted years on a degree that gave you nothing.
This isn’t about telling you what to do. If you have no other choice, you do what you must. But for many of us, the choice is between two hard paths. One leads to a potential dead end cloaked in the illusion of safety. The other, the path of passion, might seem riskier, but it’s the only one that builds a foundation that won’t collapse.
The real crisis isn't that we're running out of time. It's that the strategy we're betting on is running out of road.