I have had mostly negative experiences with compensation; this can be attributed to the general wage depression and my inability to get anything other than entry level jobs/minimum wage work. As wages have stagnated, people my age have watched themselves get poorer and poorer as time goes on. Prior to restarting school I worked for an environmental consulting firm as a contractor doing data auditing. My effort was really impacted when the company kept me on past my hire date without hiring me, despite being the top performer on the team. It was also impacted when I realized that they were actually paying more to the contracting agency then it would technically cost to hire me as a full time employee. Of course later I found out that our entire floor was being outsourced to a state with a lower minimum wage, with COVID as a convenient excuse. We were given the GENEROUS offer of interviewing for our positions again, and moving across country for a pay-cut, with no financial assistance or severance. At that point they asked me to stay and train my replacement, and I politely informed them that I wasn’t willing to expose myself to COVID just so they could pay someone $8 an hour instead of $14. It was pretty rough on my morale realizing that even at $14 an hour I wasn’t able to rent a shoebox in Portland or the surrounding area. I don’t really have parents or a safety net so I’m completely on my own financially and I realized that I needed to complete my degree so I wouldn’t be in that situation again. My feelings were based in a couple of different rationales. Firstly, my needs were not being met financially and I couldn’t earn enough to support myself despite living frugally. Secondly, it was about self-worth for the amount of work I was doing. It was very upsetting to realize that I worked my tail off for that amount of money and they turned around and paid someone even less to do the same; all while promising to hire me for a close to a year. I saw no future at a company being managed by a hedge fund. Stamping out meaningful conversations while pivoting to an excessively extractive profit model was a surefire way to destroy the morale of anyone with less than a Director/VP level position.