u/Even-Constant5389

Hi all, I am planning to go to TAMU masters program for deck next year, and am looking at the current poor(er) 3M hiring market. My plan would be to go Mil. Sealift Command to get lots of sailing days quickly and the high pay for 3M (~$180-200k). I understand I would be sailing like 9-10 months at a time for this pay.

But since Mil. Sealift Command supposedly caps pay a bit above $200k, I plan to get my 2M and maybe Chief Mate with Mil. Sealift Command then switch to a union for the rest of my career and work 6 on 6 off until retirement.

Please poke holes in my plan if there are any; I am excited about this career change and just want to hear from more experienced people if I am naive here. I come from a high finance background so I am used to 65+ hour weeks but they were spent behind a computer.

Apologies for intruding as a 0L, but wanted to get opinions from people actually involved in recruiting. I'll be matriculating to a school with solid biglaw placement this year. I'm in my late 20s, and have only done very sparse volunteering work since leaving a venture capital associate role a few years ago.

I'd been separated from my long time girlfriend by COVID travel bans, and a few months into starting the venture role, she died. I had just moved to a new city and didn't have a support structure in place. I persisted in a haze for a year until we'd expended our capital, assisted with transitioning in a replacement for myself to handle managing relationships with and advising our portfolio companies, and then I crashed out, withdrew, and remained pretty isolated for a long time. I've recovered slowly since then and feel quite solid now.

I assume there's no way to dodge questions about a multi-year resume gap, and I'd prefer to not make something up wholesale to explain it away. Is there any way to frame the actual story such that it's not repeatedly making interviewers uncomfortable, becoming the only thing they remember about me, and throwing up red flags for risk regardless of how sympathetic it is?