I Have a CS Degree and a Half-Finished Short Film, and I Don’t Know What to Do Next
I’m sitting at my kitchen table right now, half a slice of cold pepperoni pizza next to my laptop, and both VS Code and Premiere Pro are open on separate desktops. I’ve been flipping between them for three hours, and I haven’t gotten anything done in either. It’s 7 PM on a Tuesday, my roommate’s at his CS job (the one he accepted back in April) and the only sound besides the fridge humming is my cat knocking a pen off the table. I graduated three months ago, and I still haven’t answered the two emails sitting in my inbox: one from the fintech that offered me a full-time dev job, one from the film MFA I got accepted to this spring. One says start next month, the other says confirm your spot by Friday. I need to decide, and I have no idea how.
It’s not like this came out of nowhere. I started sneaking into film classes sophomore year, after I finished my CS requirements early. I’d sit in the back of 16mm production, not tell anyone I wasn’t enrolled, and help people load film into the cameras after class. I made my first short that year, a 10 minute thing about a guy who deletes all his photos except one of his grandma’s old dog, and when we screened it at the campus student film night, someone clapped so hard I cried in the bathroom afterwards. That’s when I knew, I guess. But knowing doesn’t pay rent, or student loans. I already owe $28k for the CS degree. The MFA is $35k a year for two years. The fintech job pays $115k a year, with a $10k signing bonus. That math doesn’t lie, right?
I went to a local indie film meetup last month, to try to meet people, get a sense of what actual working film people do. I bought a $12 beer, stood around by the snack table, and listened to three people argue about whether The Banshees of Inisherin was overrated. I’d only seen it once, and I spent most of it thinking about the color grading, so I didn’t say anything. When someone asked what I did, I said I was a CS grad thinking about going to film school, and one guy who looked like he’d been doing this 20 years just snorted and said “wow, you’re throwing away a golden ticket for what? So you can boom mic for student films for five years?” That stung. I left early, stopped at McDonald’s on the way home, ate a Big Mac in my car, and thought maybe he’s right.
But here’s the thing I don’t tell people: I actually like CS. I like the way a problem breaks down into little pieces, how when you fix a bug everything just clicks into place. I got an A in algorithms, I used to do LeetCode for fun when I was bored on the bus. I don’t hate coding. I just hate the idea of spending 40 hours a week coding a feature that lets people buy throw pillows faster, or optimizing ads for weight loss teas. Last summer I interned at that same fintech, and I spent six weeks debugging a notification system for peer-to-peer payments. When I finished, my manager high-fived me and said I did great, and I went home and stared at my wall for an hour and couldn’t feel anything. Compare that to the weekend I spent shooting my half-finished short: we got rained out of our first location, had to move everything to that 24 hour diner off the highway, the lead actor (my old algorithms buddy, who did it for free pancakes) forgot half his lines, and by the end of the night I was so tired my feet ached, but I couldn’t sleep because I was so excited looking at the day’s footage. That’s the feeling I can’t get from coding, no matter how good I am at it.
I volunteered at the small local film festival last month, helped carry gear and park cars. I ended up holding a boom for a short that a guy in his 40s directed. He’d been making films for 15 years, still drives for Lyft three nights a week to pay rent. We were sitting on the curb between setups eating granola bars, and he asked me what my deal was. I told him the whole thing, CS job vs film school, and he didn’t give me that stupid follow your dream speech. He just wiped crumbs off his jeans and said “I knew a guy who quit a six figure tech job to do film 10 years ago. He hated it, quit after two years and went back to tech, now he’s happier than any of us. I knew another guy who stayed in tech, made short films on weekends, he’s happy too. The only people who are miserable are the ones that stay in something they hate just because they’re scared to try the other thing. Doesn’t mean it’ll work out. Just means you won’t spend 30 years wondering.” That was helpful, but it didn’t answer my question, y’know?
I check my half-finished short almost every day. It’s about a CS grad who can’t stop checking his work Slack on a first date, which is way too on the nose, I know. I’m stuck on the last five minutes of color grading, can’t get the diner lights to look warm enough, the way they looked when we were shooting. Sometimes I think I’m just stalling because if I finish it and it’s bad, then what? What if I’m not any good at this, and I just threw away a good job for nothing? What if I’m good at it, but still can’t pay my rent? What if I take the job, and 10 years from now I’m sitting in a nice suburban house with a 401k and I still kick myself for not trying?
My cat just jumped on the table and stepped on my keyboard, closed both VS Code and Premiere Pro, like she’s trying to force my hand. The deadline is Friday. I still haven’t replied to either email. My mom texts me every other day to say she supports whatever I choose, but I can hear the worry in her voice when we talk. My dad says I can always do film as a hobby, which is true, but when have I ever done anything just as a hobby? I throw myself into things—that’s how I got the CS degree, that’s how I got into the MFA.
I don’t have a neat ending here. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I just know that right now, I’d rather color grade bad student films for 12 hours a day than debug ad algorithms. I just don’t know if that’s enough to pay back $100k in student loans. If anyone’s been here, I’d love to know how you decided.
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