Dear Georgetown:
After spending four months in a country on the other side of the world, I felt like a changed person. India had challenged me in many ways, pushing me outside of my comfort zone and giving me insight into the structural inequalities that pervade our society today. India’s slow pace of life wasalso a welcome change. It not only encouraged me to live in the present, but also reminded me that life is not just about getting that next internship — life is about actually living.
Thus, as I prepared to return to D.C. for my third-to-last semester on the Hilltop, I felt completely prepared for anything Georgetown could throw at me. Yet I soon realized that while my entire life might’ve changed, Georgetown seemed to have remained just as I had left it seven months ago. Feelings of unease started to wash over me. I was no longer certain that I was ready to go back to a place where people can become so fixated on perfecting their resumes and submitting application after application for that “perfect” semester or summer internship that they tune everything else out.
Mere days into the first week of spring semester, I was met by a flood of emails from the career center informing me of various career events on campus. On top of figuring out my class schedule and adjusting to the faster pace of life, I was feeling overwhelmed and disconnected.
Not wanting to fall behind, I signed up for and attended as many information sessions as I could, even though my heart was not always in it. My lack of enthusiasm soon became self-doubt as I began to question my own motives. I wondered whether I was going to information sessions and applying for internships simply because everyone else was doing it. The external noise was deafening and only seemed to grow louder.
Feeling lost and confused, I reached out to my mentors for advice. Toward the end of our conversations, I always asked them to point me in the right direction and to tell me what they thought I should do. To my disappointment, they told me that they could not answer my pleas — it was up to me to decide my future and no one else could do it for me.
Even after speaking with my mentors, I still couldn’t help but wonder whether I was actually pursuing my passions and or if I would actually be satisfied working at the firms that I applied for. My mind was racing a mile a minute, but things weren’t getting any clearer.
But everything clicked for me last week when I was expressing my latest doubts to the latest alum I had reached out to, a 1989 School of Foreign Service graduate. As we were wrapping up our conversation, I asked him one last question out of the blue: How are your friends doing now? He told me that some 20 years out of college, his Georgetown friends were all largely satisfied with where their careers had taken them and where they were now. It was at that moment that I finally understood.
Almost two months from turning 21 years old, I was starting to feel rather old. Freshman year felt like ages ago — where had time gone? As an upperclassman, I was undoubtedly one of the older students on campus.
Yet in the larger scheme of things, being almost 21 means that I’m still young and still have so much of my life ahead of me. As students at such a prestigious university, each decision we make to either accept or decline an internship or job offer seems monumental. We are devastated when we put in tremendous time and effort into preparing for interviews and don’t even get a first-round interview. We become flustered when we can’t decide between well-paying internships and unpaid ones that we feel truly passionate about. It is these types of decisions that eat away at us to the point of consuming us.
I’m certainly not advocating for students to stop applying for internships or to stop considering their post-graduation career options, because planning ahead is important. I do want my classmates here at Georgetown to continue aiming high. However, should they fail to obtain that all-important internship, they should not view it as a major setback. In fact, that missed opportunity might just open the door to something completely unexpected but extraordinary nonetheless.
Thus, as the interview process ramps up for some and slows down for others, I wish all of you the best of luck and hope that all of you keep things in perspective … because some 20 years down the road, you’re not going to remember why you ever broke a sweat over that college internship that you did (or didn’t) do.
Jenny Chen is a junior in the School of Foreign Service.