In elementary school, whoever has the coolest lunchbox or runs the fastest on the playground is the envy of the entire class. Fast forward 10 years, and it’s not about lunchboxes anymore. It’s about LinkedIn connections, prestigious internships, and schmoozing with alumni for references.
Whoever lands the most impressive internship has everyone around them going, “Damn, I need to do something about my life.” And now that summer is starting — and therefore, summer internships — I’m thinking to myself that I should’ve gotten a job instead of an internship that pays in experience.
This is no shade to my internship or to anyone with a summer internship right now. I love my boss, and I’m happy to do the work I’m doing. That said, sometimes I look back on last summer when I was working as an assistant dance coach for one weekend and made $300. I barely did anything — I ran to the grocery store to get snacks for the dancers, I reviewed choreography, I gossiped with the head coach, and that was about it.
Now, I scramble to write blog posts, create contact lists, condense LinkedIn posts, coordinate with the social media team, and stress myself out for a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents.
I’m sure other students have internships that pay actual money, but I was naive enough to think that having an internship at all would be enough. Turns out, when you’re buying wholesale pallets of instant ramen (that’s a month’s worth of food for $30) with your parents’ money and hearing other students say magic words like “paycheck” and “income,” you start wishing for the job you had in high school.
But these days, it’s hard not to prioritize professional experience in the field you’re getting a degree in. My professors and career advisors stress the importance of making connections and gaining experience as the launchpad for a long-lasting and fulfilling career.
I’m aiming for grad school, and they’re going to want to see three internship experiences on my application, along with a stellar GPA and recommendation letters. But grad school is years away, and you know what I want now? I want to go to Trader Joe’s every day. I want designer boots. I want to clock out and do my own thing instead of keeping an eye on my notifications at all times for texts from internships.
The long-term benefits are massive — or maybe they aren’t, who knows? There just aren’t enough short-term upsides. Sometimes, I’d genuinely rather walk around Boston picking up tin cans to bring to the recycling center for a quarter than write another blog post.
Maybe in a few years, this exercise in delayed gratification will pay off. It could be much worse — I could hate my boss, I could hate my work, or I could sell my soul working for a company that funds genocide.
And I don’t always regret not getting an actual job. Maybe I just need to look further into the future.
Yeah, that’ll be what I tell myself when I’m sprinkling crushed-up Takis into my instant ramen.
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