I (22F) graduated from uni last year, I postponed looking for a job to spend the last year travelling which was always my plan and I made it clear to everyone that I was taking the year off. My degree involved “creative disciplines” and had “design” in the name but was in the School of Engineering and involved engineering, science and maths. I spent all my time during my degree patiently explaining to friends and family that I’m not doing art, interior design, or fashion design, which most people still didn’t seem to listen to at all as they would only latch onto the word “design” in the name and say the same thing next time I saw them. I repeatedly got dismissive and snide toned comments like “Why do you even need to go to a mechanics class for art?”, “Can you design my living room for me?” or “You just do fashion don’t you lol?” even after the 10th time explaining I don’t do any of those. Note - I have the utmost respect for all those subjects and love anything creative, the derogatory and dismissive angle was only ever coming from them and I was simply correcting false assumptions about myself. At the start of summer I was at a family event and when sitting amongst a room full of people my aunt started telling me how she went to a local school gala and there was a lady with a stall who was personalising boxes by writing people’s name on them in a creative style and how nice they were. Then she suggested I do that too and go around school galas and fun days doing that and how it will be good for me as a job. I was a little stunned but replied politely that it sounds really nice but I’m going to start looking for a proper job soon using my degree like I always planned. She shouted back at me “It IS a proper job!” with an insanely angry expression that shocked me as it was such a random and small exchange. She then spent the rest of the time acting annoyed with me and is now telling people about it and framing the scenario as something I said to actively belittle and look down on people like the lady she was telling me about who runs the stall, and some people who weren’t actually there and were only told the story by her have said I am rude. Extra info - Her daughters have got degrees too and all gone into professional jobs *and* they all also took gap years to concentrate on personal growth first before they went to uni (the only difference is I took mine after uni), so it’s not as if her frame of reference for all of this is different.