any tips for someone considering trade school? i love the idea of being able to work w/ my hands but don't have much clue what direction I'd wanna go with it
Oh I didn't go to school! I started out in custodial for my local college and just... kept doing that until a job opened in another part of maintenance and operations.
I think that's a thing a lot of folks don't see, but like- there's such a thing as on-the-job learning and workplace mobility still, it's just all in the jobs people don't treat as the "sexy" ones so you never hear about it. Yeah, I've cleaned a lot of toilets in my time, found a whole, unpeeled banana in a urinal once, but genuinely, even compared to eight years of retail, it's been far, FAR better work- and without the pressure of bullshit corporate sales figures and customer service, I've found you tend to have more laid-back and decent management in these sorts of fields too. Like, I'd go to war for my boss, because she can and has done the same for us time and time again, and that's rare and wonderful.
So yeah, my advice is- if you wanna start gaining experience in those sorts of jobs, look for entry level work in maintenance, custodial, etc at local businesses, colleges, hospitals, airports, etc, and go from there- you can always move on if it doesn't suit you, and if it does, you have your foot in the door to go elsewhere in that field!