Author: Mike Nova

• Audrey Serna, 33, left college after two semesters.
• It was challenging to find a job while pregnant and without a college degree.
• Serna now makes six figures, and she doesn’t regret her decision to forgo college.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Audrey Serna, 33, who dropped out of college after two semesters. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It was a horrible feeling to drop out of college when all of my peers chose that route. But I wouldn’t have done anything differently.

After graduating from high school in 2010, I enrolled at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. I grew up in an environment where I was told that college was the only path to success, so I didn’t even consider taking a different route. I quickly realized, though, that college was not the right fit for me: I struggled to balance school and my social life while working part-time jobs, and it was weighing on my mental health.

I withdrew from college after two semesters and started on an emotionally and financially draining career journey that I’m now grateful for.

Job searching without a college degree

I felt like a total failure leaving school at 20 years old. I was working just to pay the bills — I held two jobs as a restaurant server and in retail, and in the back of my mind, I always had motivation to push myself to find a more stable career. I just didn’t know how.

Many companies rejected me right off the bat because I didn’t have a college degree, which wasn’t a good feeling. I had moments where I felt like I wouldn’t make it anywhere because I didn’t have a degree, but I persevered. All it took was meeting just one person who was willing to take a chance on me.

Job searching while pregnant was frustrating. When hiring managers saw that I was pregnant, that was usually the end of the road for me, but knowing that I had a child to support was a big motivator to keep pushing and find a salaried role.

I had my first child in 2014, and that’s when my career actually started to take off. I landed an entry-level payroll job — my first 9-to-5 job — and I went into it with the attitude of trying to be the best employee at the company, which meant being responsive and working quickly. Upper management liked my work ethic and decided to take a chance on me, and they offered me a managerial position that I held at the company for about six years.

It wasn’t easy, though. Before I had my child, I was paying the bills as best I could, but I was struggling for a while. At one point, I went six or seven months without power in my apartment because my minimum-wage jobs weren’t enough to cover my expenses.

I don’t regret leaving college

I’m now a mom of two kids living in the DC area, and their fathers are not in the picture, so I support myself and my children financially. During the pandemic, I was struggling with my salary at the company where I had started, so I sought a better opportunity. I connected with a recruiter on LinkedIn who helped me land my first job, which was close to six figures. I was later recruited for my current role as a payroll operations manager, where I earn a six-figure salary. I can pay my bills, and I’m working on improving my credit.

Saving money is an ongoing process, and I’m doing what I can to budget for my long-term goals, like owning a home and traveling. I try my best to eat at home and throw excess money into a savings account that accrues interest. There are always months that are tighter than others, but as someone who has had many bad years financially, I try to give myself grace and know that things will get better.

It makes me emotional to see where I am now, compared to how I was when I was 19 years old, unsure of what to do with my life without a college degree.

I don’t have any regrets because I took the path that life wanted me to take. Education is obviously important, and while college does not define your worth, it can definitely make things easier. It’s an amazing accomplishment that jobs like to see. But I also think that with the right motivation, you can be equally successful without a degree. It’s just a little more difficult.

I still haven’t ruled out returning to college later in life. The costs are a barrier, though, and it’s not my top priority while I’m raising my kids.

Still, I want my kids — and anyone else struggling with a college decision — to know that a college degree does not define your value. Never feel like, because you didn’t go to college, that you’re less worthy or less than anybody else in the world. What’s right for you is not what’s right for somebody else, and you’re going to get to your end goal some way or another.

• Sitting at a computer all day can lead to poor posture and back pain.
• Dr. Jason Snibbe, an orthopedic surgeon, shared tips for staying upright while you work.
• Find a chair with lower back support and armrests.

It’s tricky to maintain good posture while sitting at a desk for hours each day, but a few simple adjustments to your work setup could make a big difference, a top orthopedic surgeon said.

It’s thought that around 66% of Americans have what’s known as tech neck or forward head posture, where the head and chin protrude and put pressure on the neck.

It’s common in office workers who crane their necks to look at screens (big and small) all day. This can cause neck and back pain, headaches, and lead to more serious musculoskeletal problems, like kyphosis (curvature of the spine).

“When you’re sitting at a desk, your body gets stiff, your body gets tight,” Dr. Jason Snibbe, the official orthopedic surgeon of the LA Clippers, who also counts Kris Jenner as a patient, said.

But getting up from your desk and stretching or going on a short walk can help your muscles stay strong and flexible, he said.

Snibbe shared four tips for supporting good posture and preventing back pain if you work at a desk.

Try a standing desk

Using a standing desk can be a great way to take pressure off your spine and reduce the number of hours you spend seated each day, Snibbe said.

“Your body can shift and move,” he said.

A small 2024 study published in Healthcare found that people with forward head posture scored better in a postural assessment and muscle tiredness test after working at a standing desk for 30 minutes than those who used a regular desk. The standing desk group also scored higher in a self-reported comfort questionnaire.

AirPods are your friends

Snibbe tells his patients with sedentary jobs to set an alarm for every 30 minutes or so to remind them to get up from their desks and move around a little.

But he knows this isn’t always possible, so recommends using wireless headphones to integrate more movement into your working day.

“The beauty of that is people can now take calls. They can go on a walk and take a call, they can have a conversation, they can have a business meeting while they’re exercising, which I think is a wonderful, wonderful thing,” he said.

Use a chair with lower back support and armrests

It’s important to sit on a chair that has cushioning or some kind of support for the lower back, Snibbe said. It helps to keep the spine in correct alignment, which prevents slouching and back pain.

He said you should also choose a chair that has armrests, particularly if you’re working on computers and typing a lot, because they take stress off the neck and shoulders.

Getting a laptop stand, or simply placing some books under your computer to bring it to eye level, will also help you sit with the correct posture, he said.

Put resistance bands all over your office

When your work requires you to sit uninterrupted for hours, it means you’re not using and strengthening your muscles, but strong muscles play a big role in maintaining healthy posture.

To combat this, try tying resistance bands to handles, doors, or hooks around your office, and use them to do some strength training while you work. You can use them to internally and externally rotate your shoulders, for example, he said.

He suggested tying a band to the legs of your desk and pushing against it, mimicking a leg press. “So you’re activating your muscles, you’re moving, you’re getting the blood flowing,” Snibbe said.

• Barbara White downsized to a 55+ community after selling her Florida home for a profit.
• Demand for retirement communities is rising as older Americans seek active adult lifestyles.
• White likes the amenities, the proximity to family, and the freedom to travel more.

When Barbara White decided it was time to sell her four-bedroom house and downsize, it helped that she had 40 years of experience as a real estate agent to inform her search.

Still, it wasn’t easy to find her next home. After selling her property on Amelia Island in North Florida in July 2024 for nearly $500,000, she moved into a rental for six months while continuing to look for a smaller place closer to her two sons.

Finally, she bought a newly built, two-bedroom, 1,300-square-foot home in a new 55+ community about 200 miles south in Brevard County. She moved in last February. Crucially, she was able to use cash from her home sale to buy the new house, which she got for a bit less than its listed price of $250,000.

White, 72, is part of a surge of older Americans moving to retirement communities. Over the last decade, there’s been an explosion in demand for age-restricted “active adult” or independent living, particularly in the Sunbelt. Perhaps the country’s most famous retirement community, The Villages, has become one of Florida’s fastest-growing metro areas.

As Americans live longer, healthier lives, they want to retire in “aspirational” places that focus more on activities, hobbies, and community than healthcare, said Bob Kramer, founder of the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care (NIC).

“As people are living longer, you have people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who are just looking for a lifestyle alternative,” Kramer said.

Are you 65 or older with a story to share about your housing? Reach out to this reporter at erelman@businessinsider.com or fill out this form.

White has found it easier to make friends in a community full of older people, and she’s taking advantage of some of the amenities and programming, including water aerobics.

She’s also relieved to live in a smaller home with about half the square footage of her last home and much less stuff filling it — she donated much of her old furniture to a family in need. She made a generous profit on her home sale and feels like she got a good deal as a buyer. Her previous home sold for $481,000 after she bought it seven years earlier for $243,000. The house doubled in value largely because of Florida’s pandemic-induced population boom, which pushed home prices way up across the state.

“Everybody from the Northeast was moving down to Florida. And every time you turned around, people were overbidding on the properties,” she said.

These days, White is semi-retired from her career as a realtor. She sold a few homes this year, but she’s only taking referrals and not actively seeking work. With Social Security and some savings, she feels financially secure. So she uses the income she makes from real estate to travel as much as she can. This past summer, she went to Norway. In recent years, she’s visited Prague, Budapest, and Vienna for the Christmas markets and gone island hopping in Greece in the summer. Sometimes, she wishes she could sell everything and travel full-time.

But for the time being, she’s happy with her slower pace of life in her new home.

“I keep busy doing nothing,” she joked. “The days and the weeks go pretty quickly.”

Emily Reynolds runs a PR company, and with that responsibility comes the pressure to look young, she tells me.

She’s 44 but often passes as younger, and that’s by design. Reynolds has tried Botox, filler, laser facials, hydrofacials, and invests in expensive skincare products. She has a Peloton and does intense workouts a la Barry’s Bootcamp. She’s walking the precarious line, she tells me, between looking mature enough to show she’s an experienced professional who can run and mentor a team, and young enough to be relevant.

Even as she thinks critically about beauty standards imposed on women, Reynolds worries what would happen to her business and professional reputation if she abandoned her rituals and routines — and what’s going to happen as she continues to age. “How long will I be quote-unquote publicly perceived as attractive?” Reynolds says. “And when I’m not, what happens to me professionally? That’s the thing I think about daily.”

While talking about looks in the corporate world remains taboo, years of research show attractive people tend to gain more trust than their plainer-looking counterparts, and that pretty and thin people tend to land jobs and advance up the career ladder to earn more money than others. Now, thanks to filters, Facetune, modern shapewear, high-end gyms, and a revolution in skincare products, corporate workers can be their own glam teams. GLP-1s lure people with a seemingly simpler path to thinness than diet fads and Weight Watchers menu items. And because conventional beauty has never been more accessible, the expectation that the average worker attains it has perhaps never been higher.

These beauty secret regimens aren’t secrets — no longer treatments just for those with pretty people jobs like modeling and acting, but touted by regular people with 9 to 5s all over TikTok, where office workers sit before the camera and show themselves doing multi-step skincare routines and complex makeup and morning routines. You, too, can have a perfect, poreless face like the people on your Instagram feed, if you’re willing to invest.

And in a precarious job market notoriously frosty to older workers, what better to justify that investment than thinking being hot can advance your career?

The rise of remote work let workers trade pinching shoes and tailored pants for slippers and sweats worn out of frame, but it also forced desk workers’ faces in front of unforgiving cameras daily.

That meant confronting a mirror of their own image and imperfections while trying to focus on meetings. A study published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal in 2021 found that more than one-third of participants in Australia started to negatively judge parts of their appearance after spending more time on video calls during the height of the pandemic. A survey of dermatologists published in 2021 in International Journal of Women’s Dermatology found that more than half of practitioners reported an increase in cosmetic consultations, with more than 80% of patients citing concerns with their appearance on video calls. Data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) shows that cosmetic surgery procedures increased by 19% from 2019 to 2022, and have continued to climb at a slower rate since.

As conventional beauty has never been more accessible, the expectation that the average worker attains it has risen.

Beyond COVID, age-old ageism and workplace pressure also drive people toward cosmetic procedures, C. Bob Basu, president of ASPS, tells me in an email. “Many patients tell us they want to look ‘less tired,’ ‘more energetic,’ or ‘more alert’ — especially in leadership roles, client-facing environments, or fast-paced industries where confidence and presence matter,” Basu says. These people often focus on their faces and necks, engaging in procedures that lessen under-eye bags, lift eyelids, or lead to sharper jaw lines, Basu says. While the workplace is “rarely the sole driver” behind a cosmetic procedure, he says do weigh it in their choice, and that many patients cite watching themselves on video calls as the inciting incident.

Alanna Barry, a 30-year-old working in public relations, says that after staring at herself on screen for months, she became fixated on her teeth. Sometimes, when she smiled, the light in the room would hit them in a way she felt accented their imperfections. She’s looking to pay out of pocket for Invisalign to get the smile she wants — to feel more confident herself, and so that energy comes off when speaking to clients. But she also feels that having a perfect smile could make her more memorable. “My confidence is just completely shot,” Barry tells me. “I do feel like there’s a stigma that if you present yourself a certain way and you’re more polished or you have less flaws that are visible, you tend to get better opportunities than someone who’s maybe not looking their very best.”

LinkedIn has made looks a part of even the job seeking process by showing recruiters your face for roles that, in theory, shouldn’t rely on looks at all. Now there are several companies offering ways to use real photos combined with to generate well-lit, flawless AI professional headshots — a glowing professional image previously only in reach for those who could pay photographers with good equipment and good lighting. With AI initially evaluating so many profiles for jobs it’s become fitting for more to rely on AI to boost their online persona.

But with the mass adoption of AI as an image editor, people might start looking the same. AI editing “tries to neutralize literally everything, and in that homogenization, what we get is a loss of individuality, and a loss of cultural diversity,” says Gretchen Andrew, an artist who uses AI and oil painting in her pieces that comment on the highly filtered beauty standards. Bill Cava, who runs AI consulting firm Generative Labs, tells me he experimented with an AI version of himself. It created a more polished look — smoother skin, no gray hairs. But he says he learned from his clients’ reactions that showing up deeply human and authentic was the better move. “I was like, ‘hey, that looks wonderful,'” Cava tells me about seeing the AI version of himself. “But my clients were like: “No, please don’t do that.'” He realized that “it seems to violate the trust” he had with people.

Similar to minor dental work, it’s some of the least invasive, low-lift cosmetic procedures that are growing in popularity. The ASPS says lip augmentation procedures have increased steadily year-over-year, growing from 1.38 million in 2022 to 1.45 million in 2024. The number of people using injectables like Botox has nearly doubled between 2019 and 2024, from just over 5 million to nearly 10 million. The global beauty industry, currently valued at $450 billion, is expected to reach a $590 billion valuation by 2030, according to a 2025 analysis from McKinsey, with skincare making up some 40% of the market.

Even people who oppose the role looks play in the workplace find themselves drawn to manipulating their image. Maureen Wiley Clough, who hosts the podcast “It Gets Late Early” about ageism in white-collar America, tells me she got Botox for the first time after watching herself on a screen and obsessing over lines on her face she hadn’t noticed much before. She quit Botox about a year ago, after she became worried about possible long-term effects. Wiley Clough is an advocate for breaking down age-based barriers in the workforce, yet still found herself judging lines on her face. “Aging is something that you think happens to other people,” she says. “I wasn’t ready for it.”

The workplace benefits of pretty aren’t just a perception — there’s data to show more attractive workers earn more. A study published in 2023 that found attractive MBA holders earn 2.4% more than other MBA graduates, and that the prettiest people can earn $5,500 more annually. The study used machine learning models trained to evaluate the attractiveness, and found that the benefit of good looks persists throughout a career, not just for young interviewees. “It’s not that they are only benefiting right in the beginning, in the quick interview with their MBA program, but the benefit actually persists five years, 10 years, into their career as well,” Nikhil Malik, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California and lead author of the study, tells me. Another surprising finding: “It matters as much for men as it does for women.”

I have to reverse age to stay here. Why is the window so short to be professionally relevant?Emily Reynolds, PR executive

High-powered men in tech are increasingly getting facelifts. Men now make up 7% of plastic surgery patients, according to ASPS. “While certainly less controversial or stigmatized thanks to social media and other trends, men’s pursuit of cosmetic surgery may be a way to get a leg up in an uncertain economy,” the society’s 2024 report says. “An increasingly competitive job market may be fueling renewed interest for men in aesthetic health because it offers an opportunity for men to improve their confidence.”

The boom in GLP-1 use for weight loss (some 12% of Americans say they are currently using the drugs, according to health research firm KFF) has only furthered perceptions that people can and should be thin, says Ally Duvall, senior program development lead at Equip, a startup focused on eating disorder treatment. The Society for Human Resource Management surveyed about 1,000 human resource professionals in 2023 and found that about a quarter said obese employees are more likely to be perceived as unmotivated and lazy than slimmer workers. And fear of missing out on your job due to your size is realistic — weight-based discrimination is legal in much of the US. While workplaces celebrate diversity of race, sexuality, or religion, they rarely touch on body size. Duvall says weight stigma may seem justified at work, because some people inaccurately link thinness with health.

“If you aren’t doing things about it, then you’re morally wrong, or you’re a bad person, or you’re not taking your life seriously, or you’re not doing the things that you should in order to achieve this most successful life out there,” Duvall says people may think about larger workers to justify their bias.

Work isn’t the sole motivator for many who want to control their appearance. Reynolds tells me it’s not just for her PR firm — wants to look good and feel good for herself. She’s confident about her abilities, and proud of the hard work she did to get to a place of expertise. Despite her accomplishments, it feels like her work could slip away. “Now, I have to reverse age to stay here,” Reynolds tells me. “Why is the window so short to be professionally relevant?”

Ageism, weight stigma, and pretty privilege are some of the hardest biases to dismantle; doing so requires unraveling the conscious and subconscious ways we’ve come to value and interpret beauty over a lifetime, and also confronting aging and mortality without fear. We’re typically our own harshest critics, but there’s enough evidence to wonder if others are critiquing our looks alongside our resumes, too.

“If people think that they can get further in their career by throwing some Botox in their forehead, they’re going to keep doing it,” says Wiley Clough. “The sad part is, in many ways, I think they’re probably not wrong.”

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.