In my theatrical stagehand discourse communities, one problem that a fair bit of us face is getting our foot in the door early on in our careers. From my own experience, having aspirations to work as a stagehand while at the high school level was a bit frustrating as I had a lot of obstacles in my way. First and foremost, I was still a kid in high school who only had less-than-basic knowledge on theatrical operations. My environment had a big effect on my skill level, as I was still in high school and my high school was unfortunately not an institution that specializes in the arts and was simply a basic high school. I had some resources available within the high school, and although I did exhaust my efforts in learning everything I could within that environment, my time in high school eventually ended and with the pandemic, I haven’t had a chance to revisit and spend some more time learning more theatrical skills with the tools they have in an extra-curricular fashion. In college, in addition to learning more advanced and more valuable skills, the issue of managing school, life, and work is the new frontier. There’s a lot more chances for opportunity, but there’s also a lot more responsibility involved within the entire process. Making the problem of the relative difficulty of making connections isn’t really being made visible to outsiders, at least from my perspective. I think that the reason for this is that this predicament really doesn’t seem to be specific to my field. A lot of other jobs in the world require good connections (alongside the proper qualifications) in order to launch a career. I feel like talking about the general relative difficulty of making connections could benefit younger people and people who have a general idea of what they want to do in life, as it prepares them a bit earlier and helps them in creating the connections they need to succeed.