Unecessary Fears

Now that Spring Break has come and gone it is time to hunker down and finish out the semester strong. While my senioritis has not seemed to have waned, I have noticed that I have started thinking realistically about my future a little bit more. I am coming the realization that if I don’t know exactly what I am doing come May 8th it is OK; many people do not. I am also realizing that moving to Atlanta even though I do not have a job there will not hurt me, rather it will make me more accessible for that day when jobs become abundant, or at least less sparse.

Yet, with all of these positive realizations I have also noticed that I have developed some silly fears. While I don’t lose sleep over these fears by any means, they are often on my mind:

1. I don’t like eating enough to spend lots of time cooking for just me…I worry I will spend the next year or so subsisting off of pasta and raw veggies.
2. I won’t have anyone to go out to eat with me and will have to confront my fear of eating out by myself.
3. I will become addicted to bad television for lack of something better to do on a weekday evening
4. What does one do with all the time they have once it is not occupied by school/schoolwork?
5. Loneliness

So, in summary my fears include having too much time on my hands and either not eating or eating terribly. These are both issues that I can easily cope with but they do come to mind every once in awhile and when they do, I have nothing to do but to laugh to myself because I know everyone is probably thinking the same thing right before they go out on their own, but how many people blog about it?

Some Catharsis

Recently I was applying for an internship at a large firm in Atlanta and they posed a question that made me thing long and hard:

Please write an essay (approximately 400 words) on your most challenging situation, how you handled it and the outcome.

One would think that this would be an answer that would just pop into my head, well it didn’t. But, I was pretty satisfied with what I came up with:

I have been very lucky in that my life has not been fraught with many significant challenges. I have grown up in an affluent area with two parents; success came easily throughout both high school and my time at Clemson. Now that my time at Clemson is drawing to an end, I seem to be faced with the biggest challenge of my life: weathering the abysmal job market. My dream is truly to have a career in public relations and this dream really is no secret, I have been talking about it and doing everything I could to learn as much as I could about it since I was a sophomore in college. Everyone I have spoken with over the past two and a half years has told me that I would be a great asset to any firm I decided work for, thus making the prospect of finding employment sound just as painless as applying to college all over again (which in retrospect was a piece of cake). I have come to find that in these current times, nothing about jobs is painless and finding employment and in turn my total independence has become the biggest challenge I have ever faced.

It is difficult to hear from those who have gone before me that I have done everything right when doing everything right feels as though it is getting me nowhere. Unfortunately, the life I have led where things have come relatively easy for me is beginning to come back to haunt me. I am not used to this much uncertainty about my future and it is a very scary thing for me.

It has taken awhile, but I am beginning to accept the fact that currently doing everything right is not enough, I am going to have to be flexible and keep my chin up. There are no magic words to be said to make jobs appear, but they will come eventually and all I can do is bide my time and get more experience any way I can so as to not get rusty when it comes to PR. The outcome is still undecided but I know whatever it may be I am sure to learn, grow, and succeed