u/nailturtle

I graduated with BA Biology this spring and want to work with fish. It was a really busy year for me (overloaded my schedule to graduate early) so I've only seriously started applying for jobs in the past 2 months. I got relevant summer jobs while I was in undergrad and (at least I thought) ample field experience just fucking around with various labs and their projects. I have several professors that I talked to, worked with, and can list as a reference but none of them have job opportunities for me.

I often exceed the criteria of the jobs I'm applying to, yet I still find writing the cover letters for my applications to be very challenging. And every single entry level job needs one for some reason. I'm definitely an overthinker about it trying to figure out what each employer wants from me and stressing out thinking I'm not it. I'm just getting sick of it. It feels like a waste of time to be writing these when I get ghosted for every job I apply to. And then reading online from other fields that cover letters usually just get immediately chucked and nobody even reads them anyway. Is what they say in other fields true for wildlife biology too? Is it just a test to see if you can follow instructions?

I feel like I should state just how much time the cover letter shit is wasting for me. Like probably way more than the average person. I feel discouraged from even applying to jobs that require one at this point. I feel like it would be better to just ditch any job that requires one because of how much time I waste on the ones that need a cover letter. I don't think I'm even a bad writer, I'm just uncomfortable embellishing how excited I am to work as a fish poop scooper for 2 dollars per eon. (And listen, I do want to be the fish poop scooper. I think it's fascinating and important. But also, I know it won't be fun and easy all the time. And I just feel the gaze of HR, like a lioness scanning the herd for the smallest sign of weakness... to find a reason to say I wasn't the right choice. Looking for any indication that I'm a human to point to as an unhirable flaw.) I'm struggling with the contradictory task of presenting as human while also being the toxic positive yesman they want who will tolerate everything and doesn't need to learn anything.

Okay long post for my inane question. Please don't tell me to use AI. I hate the garbage it makes and I think it must leave a terrible impression. Advice on how to get out of my head on this-- or where to look for jobs that don't ask for a cover letter are appreciated. I'm just feeling a little out of my depth reading other posts here.

So this may just be an artifact of the kinds of online spaces I am in. But I notice in many male-leaning spaces, especially gaming, there is this weird thing where men will loudly announce that they want to be like stepped on by a tall, sadistic woman with huge boobs or something. An example of this I can think of is helldivers 2. When the cyborgs were released as an enemy in the game, there were immediately posts about people (mostly men) wanting to be violently dominated by these very tall women that we fight in the game. (There are also male cyborgs, basically identical to the female ones but nobody says anything like that about them.)

Now, what I am mostly interested in knowing is why this is happening. Because I actually doubt that most of these men want to be literally violently killed by large, dominant women. And it is interesting that this kind of thing would be so popular, since it is kind of antithetical to traditional masculinity. Traditional masculinity says that men are supposed to want small, dainty women, and being dominated is emasculating, etc. I think these things are said as a joke, but at whose expense? Why?

It is obviously very objectifying towards women. On the surface, it might seem less problematic than fetishizing a weak, helpless woman to be "preyed upon." But in the end it is still taking some trait of a woman and making it about a man's attraction to it. Perhaps it is an attempt even to redefine female agency as another thing women are "performing for men." The female cyborgs can't just exist as 8ft tall muscular people, those traits must exist for male desire!

But on the other hand, this is men overtly rejecting their narrow role in gender expression around sex. Not in an enlightened way, and still without acknowledging the object of their desire as human, but maybe it is a change to be noted.

I really hope I don't sound like a crazy person for having seen this stuff. It's fairly common depending on where you look.