Lucky to be a college graduate for five years and not a job offer in my field since. It is actually somewhat satisfying to see myself as a struggling cognitive scientist. Too unnecessarily rebellious as an undergraduate, I ended up with a 2.64 GPA from a suitcase-state-university, no job prospects, and no graduate program placement. A few well-respected people in the field know me now though and there are projects that I am welcome to work on if I choose. However, most people won't pay you for your time, or may even ask that you to register for the lab as credit, which will cost you some money. These are not the kind of difficulties that bother me though.
Our minds demonstrate discrimination of stimuli on various tasks, recall and recognition abilities, and response measures for novel sensory experiences which create words like attention, memory, and learning in any person's vocabulary. Ever since I was in high school, wanted to make a substantial contribution, actually to go as far as to start a Kuhnian-type revolution in the field of psychology. That it may be possible to describe, predict, and alter our thoughts and unlock unknown potential of our minds is what I believe life is all about for me, because that is the core of the problem of alleviating suffering. So through this vehicle of psychology I believe it is possible to at least to a small degree help people lead happier and more satifying lives with less suffering.
The worst part of this situation is the justification people with uneducated opinions receive from learning about what I do with my time now that I have my degree. I have heard a lot of people bash cognitive science. They say things like, "What would a person ever do with a worthless degree like psychology?" and "Those psychologists on TV don't know anything." Actually, people who get on TV or write self-help/relationship-help are pretty worthless and I could even argue harmful to the discipline, but if they can help someone think about their situation in a way that they may not have before and it changes a maladaptive behavior in their life then I guess that's better than nothing. Anyway, when people say things like that it bothers me to think that my impoverished state and relatively less tangible skills may lead parents of young adults, who want to become cognitive scientists or clinical psychologists, to discourage them. It would also be nice just to change a few opinions to have a better idea of what psychology is really about besides relating it to Dr. Phil, which I don't even consider a psychologist.
No hang-in-there's or pity please, because I am passionate about my beliefs and stubborn enough to see this road less travelled through and my main point about writing this is to respond to (and hopefully persuade people to change) their views about the field of psychology.