It’s easy to tell when it is job fair time here at AU. Everyone is impeccably dressed in their best business attire: blazers, suits, ties, and high heels, and walking around carrying their folders full of recommendations, writing samples, and multiple copies of their resumes.
Or, if you are me, you are adding money to your AU ID at the last minute, and struggling to print out your resumes, which, by the way, don’t look nearly as impressive as the one the girl in front of me just left in the printing tray.
After the AU job fair, and after a coveted internship at Politico fell through, I realized I was not nearly as qualified, well connected, or experienced in internships as my peers, and I had something of an identity crisis. I felt like the job fair was a perfect allegory of my life: just trying to maintain some semblance of knowing what I was doing, in a room with hundreds of other people who wanted to do the same thing as me, and may even be better at it. When I left the job fair, which did not go anything like I had hoped it would, I began to wonder what the hell I was going to do if this whole journalism thing didn’t work out. I hadn’t really allowed myself any room to be anything else, to do anything else. I had boxed myself in so much that I felt like if I couldn’t be a successful and hard hitting journalist, I couldn’t be anything.
After a couple hours of contemplating my existence over a whiskey (or two), I realized something crazy: my life might not go exactly as planned. I might become a journalist. I might not. I might open a bar or restaurant. I might work for an advertising company. I might be a teacher. I might finally start working on the musical I’ve been planning in my head for the past year. I might do none of these things.
Most of the people I graduated high school with completed their undergraduate degrees years ago, and have since moved on to do awesome and important things. I love seeing the great places their lives have taken them, and it gives me so much joy to see my old friends and classmates have grown so much, killing it in their respective fields. But sometimes seeing these things makes me feel like I screwed up somewhere, that I should be closer to where they are. At twenty-three, I am still working on getting my Bachelor’s degree, while many of my friends are writing their Master’s thesis.
There is a good chance that I am decidedly different than some of my fellow students at American, and the people I knew in high school. I spend my breaks and weekends primarily working, you know, to pay for stuff, and the person next to me in my math class literally just told someone to be careful with his watch because it cost $4,000. I didn’t go to prom, and I didn’t really care. I wore a leather jacket to the job fair instead or a blazer (it was with a pair of nice pants and shoes, but still). I like my whiskey with two cubes of ice. I didn’t like the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. This morning, I overslept and decided wearing actual clothes to class rather than pajamas is overrated (again). And, I have no freakin’ idea what I’m going to do with my major, no idea if I’m going to get an internship this summer, and no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. But I’m working hard.
And for now, that’s fine.
