One annoying thing about college is that the prospect of the future is forever looming upon us, waiting to attack. In the back of our minds, we are always wondering what we are going to do with our lives after our four glorious years at the University are over -- especially around third year, when all the adults you know smugly ask you your life plan and laugh knowingly as you scramble to make up something to tell them. Some of us are farther along the hazy career path than others, however.
One of my roommates is in the Commerce School, and for the past month she has been prancing around our apartment in suits looking super mature and professional while I emerge bleary-eyed from my bedroom in pajamas wondering what day it is. I have been wishing her luck as she runs out the door to schmooze with business persons, who can only be described as baller, while I wave from the futon, lying prostrate watching "Scrubs."
Last week she got a couple job offers after being put up in the Ritz and taken out to dinner. My experience with procuring a summer internship, on the other hand, has been less glamorous.
Most of us with liberal arts degrees are left to our own devices to secure our career prospects, dodging a future most likely involving cardboard, a sidewalk and a donation jar. No one tries to woo us with plane tickets, steak dinners, cocktails and five-star hotel rooms. Instead, we must seek employers out and persuade them to notice us because of our GPAs and extra-curricular activities, like beer pong or watching episodes of "The Office" for an entire day.
Yet over Winter Break I was cocky for some inexplicable reason, and decided it would be a great idea to apply to six or seven very competitive internships in major cities without any safeties. I have always had a general idea of what I'd like to do, so I figured I'd try to get ahead and research the best jobs I could find in my preferred field. But every time someone asked me where I was applying and was impressed with my list of cool places, I got progressively more uneasy.
And now with each application I send out, I suffer a small panic attack and convince myself that I won't be hired anywhere and will be forced to join the circus, or even worse, become an English teacher. I don't know about you other liberal arts majors, but I hate when people ask me if I'm going to be a teacher.
The resume is the easiest to me because it's straightforward -- a list of everything you've done, and you can even make a previous job look better than it really was. For example, if your first job was working at the lemonade stand at the age of eight, you could write that you utilized resources wisely and worked well with others to solve a problem.
But the unnerving part of it is that most of us have killer, impressive resumes, so how do employers tell us apart without meeting us?
The cover letter is one of my greatest adversaries in this whole process. I am a very modest person and I feel uncomfortable complimenting myself because I'm so humble. For example, I have really cute handwriting and I think whoever hires me would benefit from this special skill, but I'm not going to explicitly tell anyone this.
But seriously, it's difficult to brag about yourself correctly; you have to sound confident and talented without overdoing it. And you have to format the letter correctly and sound excessively polite so that whoever is reading it is impressed by your business etiquette, even though you can tell they have no idea what positive traits you'd bring to the company.
Another thing I enjoy about putting together applications is getting recommendation letters from professors. You can make friends with them this way and at least try to get them to think fondly of you when they write about you.
Also, many companies, at least the ones to which I am applying, ask for a writing sample. Since I want to be a writer some day, at least if I'm not too poor or jaded by then, you'd think this would be easy for me. But these people judge writing for a living. How do I know they aren't mocking my prose at this very moment and ripping up my application with glee and relief that they've ruined my chances? You see where the panic attacks are coming from. I guess if the internship thing doesn't pan out I could always latch on to my currently employed roommate. Or build a lemonade stand.
Mary's column runs biweekly on Wednesdays. She can be reached at mbaroch@cavalierdaily.com.
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