Graphic by Zach Perrier ’25.
Claire Allison McGuire
Features Editor
The worst time of year is upon us: internship application season. A time where LinkedIn feels like the seventh circle of hell, Handshake is your best friend and 30 minute “coffee chats” over Zoom with no real coffee and hardly any meaningful chatting are a weekly occurrence. We are lucky to go to a school where accomplishment and experiential research are so emphasized, but when you can’t keep up, the weight of the “what did you do over summer?” question crushes you.
As a freshman, I applied to internships in the double digits. As a freshman humanities major, the options were few and far between. I had exactly one interview for a corporate Salesforce marketing job. Looking back, I would have hated it, but at the time, it was my one and only hope. To make a long story short, I ended up as a sales associate at a local boutique.
I felt so behind, so worthless because I couldn’t land that internship. Maybe I didn’t have enough experience and maybe I fibbed a little too hard on my understanding of what exactly Salesforce is. Here’s the thing, though: as a freshman, I’m not supposed to have experience or a grasp on complicated (boring) corporate lingo. So why do we place so much of our self-worth on whether or not a company thinks we’re hot shit?
Academia is the Hunger Games. It starts in elementary school. Who’s the smartest? Who has the best attendance? Who runs the fastest? The best are rewarded, the rest are disregarded. This continues into college, but this time, it’s self-sustained. Automated comments on posts congratulating others on their accomplishments while lying in bed in the dark is a point of development.
So how do we combat this anguishing, self-loathing cycle of academic and professional inferiority? One solution is to get an internship, but as established, that is easier said than done. Another solution is a complete revision of the education system as we know it. Start from the ground up and Pavlov dog the kids. Reward academic success without punishment. Again, easier said than done. The absence of reward is inherently punishment, or at least it is in the way humans perceive it. “Being left out” is the punishment.
So, what does that leave? Radicalization of self-assurance; knowing that you are trying your best and are doing the best you can to be where you are at and get to where you’re going. If you don’t feel confident that you are doing your best and trying your hardest, then you probably don’t care about others’ opinions anyway, right?
This is the only way to not beat yourself up over opportunities you may not get. There is no reward in gaining professional experience or landing an internship, but not having these chances feel like failures. When you equate your self-worth to the opinion of a faceless hiring manager who is only judging you based on one page of your life, your own vision of yourself is that one page. Yes, internships are important, and getting one is one of the best feelings in the world, but there are lots of things that give you that feeling. Comfort food, for example, getting a good grade on something you studied for, understanding a foreign language, seeing those who you have beef with showing their true colors (don’t lie, you love it too). All I’m saying is yes, go after that internship, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get a “CONGRATULATIONS” email.