I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m at a weird point in my life. This fall I’ll be entering into my final semester of undergrad, in December I’ll graduate with two degrees. After that I’ll have approximately eight months before starting graduate school. That means this summer, I’m home, spending my days teaching art to kids with my internship and my nights (and weekends) selling maternity clothes to pregnant woman. I should also mention that all three of these things occur in different states, undergrad, summer internship and graduate school.

I feel as though I have one foot already out the door and the other is firmly stuck to the ground behind me. Lately I’ve been struggling with the fact that what I’m doing right now, both my internship and my part-time job, are not what I want to do as a career.

I absolutely love being involved with the arts, every aspect of them. With my internship being a teaching assistant, I’m seeing how important it is that kids are exposed to the arts early in life and how they should continue to have access to the arts. It’s one thing to read about these ideas in arbitrary numbers and another to see these things in real life. I know that I’m supposed to be teaching these kids about art, but I think they’re teaching me more about how important art is.

I cycle through a new group of kids every week, anywhere between five and fifteen. All of these kids come to art camp for different reasons, whether they’ve shown interest in art or because their parents have signed them up. Usually I can tell who is there because they want to be there and who is there because their parents have signed them up. But they all are so much more creative than you would expect. Even if the kids didn’t want to come to art camp, they’re creating fascinating projects, and when you talk to them about their art they’ve created a whole world inside their heads that their art exists.

After spending my day with some of the most creative kids I’ve ever met, I’m often off to my part-time job. While not immediately relevant to my future career goals, I’m still learning a lot from my part-time job. There can be a lot said about working retail. It’s learning to deal with customers, realizing that the customer may think they’re always right and you need to let them continue to believe that, standing on your feet for hours at a time and above all, learning to have patience. I’ve worked retail before but it was vastly different. I worked in a children’s resale store that catered to a completely different clientele. Now I’m catering to women who want to wear current trends while pregnant-I’m learning how to deal with people of every background.

There are days that I regret taking an unpaid internship that I had to get a part-time job just to cover gas. I question how both of these things are supposed to help me in the long-term. Teaching has instilled in me that children are our future, that what we teach them today is what they will do tomorrow. I do not plan to go into teaching, that’s not my goal, but I think that I could quite easily end of teaching not only because it would come easily to me but because I find it so important. My part-time job will still be there after I graduate in December. With student loans that will need repaying, all while saving for graduate school, I am thankful for that. I’m continuing to gain retail experience, something that I know in the future I can continue to do in an effort to make my future dreams and goals come true.