It’s Monday night, around 10:30 pm. What should I be doing, you ask? Well I should be doing a myriad of things of which I am currently doing zero. I should be watching my online anthropology lecture. I should be doing my readings for my account management class. I should be preparing my discussion post for my Muslims in the US class. (When I list it all out like that I feel a little guilty for doing this instead, but since none of it is due tomorrow… it’ll have to wait.) So what am I doing on this rainy Monday evening? WELL, I’m currently partaking in one of my favorite and most stress-inducing pastimes… looking up potential agency internships for this summer, making a detailed spreadsheet of where each one is, what they specialize in, and who their clients are, and daydreaming of a summer spent in a hyper-modern ad agency with fish tanks built into the floor, seven on-site basketball courts, rosé on tap, and nap pods around each corner. (Does an agency with all of those features even exist? If not, it should.)
We’re now three weeks into the school year, and I’m already finding myself stressing about how my next summer will be spent. Or, more realistically, how I will get to the point of knowing where my next summer will be spent and what it will be spent doing. Even though I won’t be applying to internships for a few months, I feel like I need to start getting everything ready now. I’m trying to figure out why I feel the need to get on this immediately, and I think I know why. I finally am starting to feel like an adult. Not like, “oh I’m 18 and moving out for the first time, I’m an adult now even though my parents still provide everything for me and I have no idea what I am doing in life!” aka the way I’ve felt since I was, well, 18. No, no, this is a different kind of adult feeling. This is the kind of feeling like “woah. My future is coming and I want to be ready to make decisions that will set me up to be happy and fulfilled and thriving in my life.”
Why am I feeling this way now when I never have in the past? I think it’s because, for whatever reason, junior year has me feeling different. I’ve moved out of my beautiful 5th floor apartment with my best friends into an underground basement with five girls I barely know. Now, don’t get me wrong, this place is still really nice, and my roommates are all incredibly sweet and welcoming, but there’s something different about living with people you don’t really know compared to living with your best friends. Not worse, not better, just different. It’s made me feel more independent than anything else ever has, even living totally on my own which I did for a month this summer. And I don’t know why, but it definitely makes me feel more adult. Even walking around Allen Hall (University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications aka the place I spend the majority of my time) as a junior is different than it has been the past two years. I know more people, I’ve made connections with professors, and I feel more on top of my game than ever before. All of this to say, I’ve definitely been thinking a lot about my future in the ad industry and how I want to go about it. The largest struggle thus far has been deciding between sticking with design, which I have always loved, or transitioning over to the world of account management, which I have recently fallen in love with.
So, nothing this year has been bad, it’s just been different. I feel more adult, more like I’m ready to start seriously thinking about my future and my career, about cities I would and wouldn’t like to live in, agencies I would and wouldn’t like to work at, and exactly how I want to live my life, which is exciting! And scary. But I guess that’s what becoming an adult is all about.
