I’m 38, just quit my job, and went back to school. Here’s why
Today started out just like any other normal Monday. I woke up, helped get the kids ready, made some coffee, searched the house for a missing hairbrush, narrowly avoided a tantrum, forgot about the coffee, took the older child to school and eventually had a cup of microwaved coffee. If this were a normal Monday, I would then head to my co-work, open up my computer and get to work, but it’s not a normal Monday. That’s because for the first time in nearly 5 years, I don’t have a job. One month ago, I decided to leave my professional life behind, reset myself and focus in on something completely different.
In September of 2018, my family and I relocated from Chicago to Glasgow, Scotland so my spouse could be closer to her family. With the support of my boss and colleagues, I was able to keep my job back in the States helping local news stations in the United States produce better video for their digital platforms. While I still enjoyed my work and the people I worked with, I could feel the distance between the two places begin to take a toll on me. That distance combined with a multi-billion dollar merger with another company with an uncertain future left me exhausted, and I felt like mentally throwing in the towel.

During all of this, my interest in UX Design and what a career in that space would look like grew. I’ve always been fascinated by the way audiences interact with digital products and I felt that I possessed some of the core soft skills that lay the foundation for a talented UX Designers. Those soft skills include empathy, communication and curiosity. After taking some short courses and reading Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things,” I was hooked.
My amazingly supportive spouse came to me one day and said “I think it’s time you move on, we can keep up this lifestyle while you take some time and focus on your own personal development. You should quit your job.”
So I did. It was a tough decision to make, but with her support, I decided to go all in. I quit my job at 38 to go back to school, enrolling myself in the UX Design Diploma program at the UX Design Institute. I’m 6 weeks in, and I’m confident that going back to “school” was the right move for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I love producing video and I have so much respect for the responsibility that comes along with it. I’m fortunate that my relatively young career brought me to so many different places and helped so many different people tell their stories. There’s no doubt in mind that my skillset as a video producer will always have an influence on whatever I do. As a friend with a similar background put it to me, “you know how to tell a story, good UX means telling a story on a much different platform.”
So here I am, day one of a new chapter in my professional life, and as I walked to the co-work on this crisp Glaswegian fall day, the first steps involved worrying if I made the right decision, but with each step came the reassurance that I most certainly did.
