Until a Busy Salaryman Gets Accepted to UAL ① (First Half: From Employment to Deciding to Change Careers)

I am currently in my fifth year of working, and I was supposed to go to UAL starting this year, but I have deferred it for one year to save money.
So, in my sixth year of working, I will be advancing to a fashion-focused graduate school with no prior background (University of the Arts London's London College of Fashion, MA course).
I want to write about the path leading up to this as well.
By the way, the university I was accepted to is a dream university I have longed for.
I noticed the acceptance notification while checking my email on the train, and I was seriously so happy I could have jumped for joy.
After all, challenging yourself and getting accepted is fun.
I was just as happy as when I received the job offer from the company I wanted to work for.
Thinking about it, I am a lucky person to have received acceptance letters from the places I wanted to go. (Suddenly)

But it was tough. And it is still tough now.

Why did I suddenly aim for UAL?

University to Joining the Company

I attended a Kankandoritsu university. After that, I joined a major foreign-affiliated consulting firm known as the Big 4.
In other words, I have no background in fashion.
That said, I have loved clothes since I was in elementary school. The reason is simple.
Because my mother worked at an apparel company.
By the way, my mother loved fashion so much that she attended Osaka Mode Gakuen.
Watching how my mother worked, I had the image that "the fashion industry is tough even though it doesn't make money."
*My mother raised me single-handedly without any hardships. She even sent me to university. I am very grateful.

Also, luckily, I liked studying. In the end, I could only get into a Kankandoritsu university, but I had applied to a national university in Kyoto. (That was the only place with a department I wanted to go to.) Well, I failed, and I don't think I would have passed even if I had spent a year as a ronin, so I think it was good that I chose a private university right after high school, but my mother often told me, "Since you can study, do something that only people who can study can do."
I was taught from a long time ago: when you don't know what you want to do, aim for the top. Then, when you find what you want to do, you will have the right to choose.
That is why I was able to advance to the best public high school in the prefecture.
However, halfway through, there was a sense that I was suppressing what I wanted to do and aiming to be an elite recognized by society.

Or rather, I didn't know what I wanted to do most.
(Now, although I took a detour, I can shout from the bottom of my heart that it is fashion.)
During my university days, I did various part-time jobs, but I really couldn't stick with things like working at an izakaya. I also worked as a cram school teacher for group classes, but because I am a perfectionist with too strong a sense of responsibility (I'm not praising myself; having too much sense of responsibility often leads to losses), for some reason I was put in charge of 6th-grade Japanese, and they were studying so hard without playing even after elementary school ended. I couldn't just do it half-heartedly. Due to the pressure of being responsible for their passing or failing, I did grading and lesson preparation with stupidly meticulous care during unpaid overtime, and it didn't last because of the poor effective hourly wage.
So, the only part-time job that lasted was being a sales clerk at Second Street.
It was incredibly fun.
Honestly, there were times when the human relationships were difficult, but in the end, I continued working there for about 3 years until I graduated. Even 8-hour shifts felt like an instant.
That was because I could just keep staring at the clothes that were replaced every day, and I could learn about various brands.

At this point, one might think that from the outside it would be obvious that my love for clothes was real, but I didn't realize it at the time, and I job-hunted with the mysterious rationale that I should join a good company since I had studied so hard.
That said, domestic companies where the workplace and department are decided for you didn't suit my personality, and also, to put it nicely, I have high intellectual curiosity, or to put it badly, I get bored easily, so I job-hunted with only foreign consulting firms in mind, and I passed smoothly.
(During my university days, I also seriously participated in a mysterious study-related circle and was the president, so I think it was easy to pass.)

Starting Work

And, foreign consulting is, well, as expected, very demanding.
I will say this for the sake of the company's honor, but this really depends on the department. Also, it is a structural issue. At first, it was a super white department. Because the client was a pharmaceutical company.
Pharmaceutical companies make money for a lifetime once they develop one drug, and it is normal for the development period to be around 10 years, so the people inside are calm. The timeline of the flow of time is slow. And since they pay well, there are inevitably many white projects.
However, since it was a major firm, naturally there was a department within the company that targeted major domestic apparel companies.
Every time I heard rumors about the projects, I couldn't help but want to do them. By the way, I didn't hate consulting work and I was probably suited for it, but I displayed my perfectionism and sense of responsibility again, and I gradually started to accumulate fatigue. (In the end, I think people who are nonchalant and strong against external pressure, or rather, insensitive, and yet like rational things are suited for it and are the ones who remain. That is my own theory.)

I submitted a transfer request to the department specializing in apparel and was successfully hired. (Internal transfers had a process like being hired within the company.) I fulfilled my long-cherished wish and joined the project I wanted.
I ended up participating in the project for a year and a half there, but I got seriously depressed about 3 times (lol).
Even though I was supposed to be doing what I liked.
That's why I realized. Consulting is not the job I like.
I misunderstood because I "could do it."
I realized that "can do" and "like" are different.
That I would be happier if I invested my time in things I like & can do.
Actually, the salary was very good (a level that didn't lose to anyone of the same age), but I also realized that you cannot be happy with money.
Every time I got a bonus, I bought Stella McCartney platform loafers and Margiela Tabi boots, which I had always longed for, partly to relieve the stress of my daily work.

But, am I happy every day because of that? That is not the case.
No, both the Stella McCartney loafers and the Margiela Tabi boots give me confidence every time I wear them, and I still think it was good to buy them, and I am satisfied with the self-investment-like shopping, but daily happiness is a separate issue from that.
Do I work myself to the bone to do that kind of shopping? Is it worth that much? If asked, that is a separate issue, or rather.
In the end, I arrived at the conclusion that it is not about money.

Starting Self-Analysis After a Mental Break

When the third mental break came, I had no energy left to stand up, and I steered toward quitting.
By the way, I said earlier that there is a structural problem, but apparel companies don't really have that much surplus funds, and even if they do, they don't pay much to consultants. Because the profit margin is low in the first place. Budgeting is also strict. When you try to win a consulting project from such a company, the project units inevitably become fragmented. In other words, it becomes an order of several million yen every 3 months.
This means the number of contract proposals increases, and the amount of unpaid work increases (because sales activities are unpaid work). So, the amount of labor per person increases.
It becomes a model close to high-volume, low-margin.
During this period, 13 hours of work a day was the default for me. (I was accurate because I properly recorded my attendance for self-protection.) Furthermore, during busy seasons, I also worked on Saturdays and Sundays. It felt like 3 hours on Saturday and 5-7 hours on Sunday.

I don't want you to misunderstand, or rather, I don't want to misunderstand myself, but
I think the experience of working recklessly at some point in your 20s is very valuable. It will definitely become an asset later. However, it was tough lol.
There is no private life (my head is full of work 24/365), and I went to a Mr. Children concert I happened to get tickets for, and even though I thought I would definitely be moved, somehow I couldn't get into it, and there was a me who was looking down from above, and I couldn't feel anything, and I thought this was dangerous.
A life without sensitivity was the most painful thing for me, and something I didn't want to lose.

Now,
To think about changing jobs, I started self-analysis.

And the conclusion I reached was that I am not suited for consulting.

• No matter how many times I take the MBTI, the result is ENFP. Everything shows an emotional type. I was not originally a rational person. I just like to think & I ended up arming myself with logic at work.

• As you advance your career as a consultant, you become a manager. As a middle manager, the job involves figuring out how to make staff work hard, how to present the project as high-quality, controlling quality, and winning project contracts. It doesn't work unless you think of staff as pawns, but I don't feel like I can do that. As long as I can't, I will never be able to escape hard work for the rest of my life.

• I realized, albeit belatedly, that the proposition of being a consultant boils down to how to make client companies profitable and how to help them survive in a capitalist economy. I realized that since I don't really like the capitalist economy in the first place, I probably wouldn't be able to devote my heart to this proposition and would always be bumping into a sense of discomfort. This was quite a big realization.

Note: I didn't finish writing at all.

I'm a bit tired, so I'll stop here. lol
It looks like this is going to be a more epic record than I thought lol
I finished without even scratching the surface of what I did to pass UAL lol

To you who read such a long-winded text to the end,
thank you for sparing your time♡

November 4, 2023, at a cafe with a terrace