Florida

Ok so I'll try to keep this short but it might not be lol I'm mid 20s, CS background, MS in IT (graduated last year), currently living in Florida. On paper my resume looks "decent", 3 jobs, some cloud stuff, data engineering, testing. But honestly let me tell you what I actually did at each place because the resume version is a little... optimistic. Job 1 - First job out of undergrad. Manual UAT testing. Clicking buttons and writing test cases. I don't think I learned a single transferable skill in 1.5 years. It paid and that's about all I can say. Job 2 - Did some web scraping, data collection, cleaning dirty datasets during grad school. It was real work but not exactly deep. Nothing I'd call a project I'm proud of. Also unpaid, so make of that what you will. Job 3 (current) - Handling DevOps and cloud infra stuff. This is the most technical thing I've done. It's okay. I don't hate it but I don't love it either. Also unpaid. Yeah. So realistically I have maybe 1.5 years of actual paid experience and the rest is kind of... volunteering dressed up in resume language. That's been sitting heavy on me lately. Here's the thing. I don't know what I actually want to do. I'm not passionate about DevOps. I kind of just fell into whatever opportunity showed up. Now I'm staring at job listings and everything feels like it requires 3+ years of experience I don't really have in any one specific thing. The one thing that has genuinely interested me is data engineering. I actually read Fundamentals of Data Engineering on my own just because I wanted to, not for a job or class. I've also built a few pipeline projects on the side, nothing crazy, mostly following along YouTube tutorials and adapting them, but I did actually build and finish them. So there's clearly something there. But I honestly don't know if tutorial-driven projects are taken seriously or if I'm just fooling myself thinking this counts as experience. Now here's where it gets more complicated. I've also been thinking about doing a PhD in Information Science. Part of me thinks it could open doors and give me actual depth in something. But another part of me thinks it might just be me running away from figuring out what I actually want to do in industry. I genuinely can't tell which one it is. I feel like a generalist with no depth anywhere. Jack of all trades, master of none, the tech edition. Some things I'm genuinely lost on: - Should I double down on the cloud/DevOps path since that's my current job, even though it's unpaid? - Is data engineering realistic for me or am I kidding myself given my experience is mostly self-taught and project based? - Is a PhD in Information Science a legitimate next step or just expensive procrastination? - Does anyone actually get through this phase or am I just cooked? Not looking for someone to sugarcoat it. Honest takes appreciated. What would you do if you were me?