Elma Ademovic | Staff Illustator

We’ve all seen that job or internship post. It matches all your interests, aligns with your major, and is in the right location. Then, bam! It declares you need three to five years of experience. What? You’ve barely been a conscious person with critical thinking skills for that long. How are you meant to have that many years of experience in paid search advertising or AI prompt engineering under your belt? Well, come to think of it, maybe you do.

We often think of experience as hyper-specific. If we don’t have every Excel formula memorized or an entire website portfolio of our work, we’re not eligible. We’re not a worthy candidate. We’re not experienced. But since when is “experience” a case of copy-paste?

I would argue that, in most scenarios, having a wealth of micro-experiences (like leading a class discussion, caring for an elderly family member, or supervising a group of 8-year-olds in rock climbing at summer camp) are actually pretty relevant. All of these examples, no matter how small they seem, require leadership, compassion, and knowledge. To me, those traits aren’t so small. So those moments (and the skills a person develops through them) are totally transferable, especially when we think about how every day is filled with back-to-back moments, each stacked with skills, lessons, and character development.

Most of us sit with this “unqualified” feeling in a professional sense. Nearly half of all new grads say that because of this feeling, they haven’t even clicked “apply” for certain entry-level jobs. Furthermore, this feeling doesn’t necessarily vanish once we actually arrive at work; it grows. A study shows that one in three people in the U.S. and U.K. have felt unqualified at their workplace, and also that another third think that their coworkers perceive them as such. It seems that for many of us, the news banner of “unqualified” runs along our brain’s center stage, and we just can’t shake it.

This isn’t just at work (or on the job-listing portal). If we haven’t had a first kiss, we think we’re wholly unprepared for a relationship. If we haven’t taken an environmental science class before, who are we to raise our hand and share out? If we’ve never lived alone, why start now? We look at separate experiences as insular unless they’re in a linear trajectory. Yet, to me, it’s all connected.

If you tell me you’ve never been in a relationship, I would say that’s probably not true. Our friendships, relationships with neighbors, mentorships with professors, interactions with strangers, all prepare us for how we interact with our eventual romantic partners. Years of building worlds of kindness, trust, and communication with our companions absolutely informs how we navigate our dynamics with future partners.

In terms of academics, the whole point of a liberal arts education is to make us well-rounded (hello, IQ curriculum!). By definition, our interdisciplinary classes are not meant to be disjointed; your political science or anthropology or pre-med background absolutely bleeds into how you conceptualize climate change. So speak on it!

Of course, there are some things that feel completely and utterly new. If you’ve never lived alone, there’s no way around that. But, you have stayed home alone and washed your own dishes and organized your own schedule and walked yourself to class. So maybe, you’re more prepared than you think.

Regardless of the topic, there’s no such thing as being unqualified. You’ve lived every day, and with that comes truckloads of experiences, each one informing who you are and what you want. So yes, in many ways you do have three to five years of experience. In fact, you have a lifetime of experience(s).