Freshman year begins like the trailer to a feel-good movie. Sunlight. New notebooks. Delusion. Everyone is convinced they have time. Then the second year hits, and you realize this is not a movie. This is a reality show. And you are being eliminated in real time.
This is not a university. This is an arena.
Building your CV at university is not “professional development.” It is a full-scale survival operation with unstable Wi-Fi and emotional damage.
At first, the environment appears peaceful. Same lectures. Same assignments. Same delusion that everything will “work out.” Then internship season drops like an extinction-level event. LinkedIn transforms into a digital colosseum. Your classmates announce roles you didn’t know existed at companies you cannot pronounce, and suddenly, you are fighting for psychological stability.
Your CV, once a fragile one-page document of high-school achievements and one volunteering experience you vaguely remember, must now evolve into a war report. It must prove where you’ve been, what you’ve survived, and why you deserve to continue breathing in this professional wilderness. Potential is adorable, but proof is the only currency.Â
Some students mutate faster. They grow armor made of leadership positions and internship titles. They develop terrifying instincts for deadlines, applications, and rejection emails. They migrate toward fellowships, certifications, conferences, research projects—anything that looks like nourishment. Others freeze in place, hoping the storm will pass.
It does not.
By the third year, the separation is brutal. One group moves with the calm confidence of apex predators. The other group is googling “how to write a cover letter” at 3:47 a.m. while bargaining with the universe. And the emotional cost? Devastating. Comparison becomes a permanent state of mind. Rest feels illegal. Every LinkedIn scroll is a personal attack. You are exhausted, caffeinated, slightly feral, and haunted by the sense that you should be doing more even when you physically cannot. This is not productivity; it’s psychological warfare.
Eventually, a few survivors learn the truth: you do not wait until you feel ready. You become ready by moving. You stop romanticizing comfort. You stop waiting for clarity. You start stacking experiences, collecting skills, building connections, failing loudly, recovering quickly, and repeating the process because the alternative is watching everyone else evolve while you remain frozen.
Is it fair? No. Does the system care? Absolutely not. So you adapt, you evolve, and you build anyway. Not because you’re confident or calm, but because standing still feels like extinction.
In this ecosystem, your CV is not just a document. It is your survival record. It is your proof of life and your evidence that you were here, you tried, you collapsed, you got back up, and you refused to disappear quietly.
University is not about finding yourself. It is about surviving yourself. And survival doesn’t go to the smartest or the strongest. It goes to the ones who simply refuse to stop. We are all exhausted, uncertain, and improvising a future with zero instructions, yet somehow, against all odds, we are still trying.