5 Reasons Why You Should Intern Before Your Junior Year

Hey there, it's Robyn! One of the greatest things about living in Washington, D.C., in addition to the close proximity to some of the best museums and monuments, is that there’s never a shortage of opportunities; from working on the Hill, volunteering at a non-profit, to helping out at a startup, there's something for everyone. That was an enticing reason alone for deciding to go to school just steps away from the White House. I knew that in today’s job market it was critical to get experience while still in school, for the sake of both my resume and my own personal insight. That’s why I decided to take my first official paid internship position at the Niche Movement this summer. Despite only having worked with the team for a few weeks, I’ve already gained plenty of valuable knowledge and experience, which brings me to the point of this post.

If you're in college, doing an internship is an incredibly valuable opportunity. Maybe you’ve been debating between working at a local restaurant and getting an internship. Perhaps you’ve been eyeing a pretty cool position in your city but for some reason have hesitated to send in your application. I’ve learned from both my own experience and others’ stories that interning is an absolute must-do, especially if you’re in college. Here are my top 5 reasons for why you should do an internship:

1. It helps you figure out what career you want to pursue.

Internships are one of the best, quickest ways to learn in-depth about a career field. While school is incredibly valuable, that's something you can’t do by simply sitting in a classroom. Perhaps you've gotten an internship at J.P. Morgan, based on the idea that you'd like to go into investment banking, but soon discover that you hate everything that comes with a job in that field. After interning at a local startup company, you may realize that entrepreneurship and technology better align with your passions and talents. Just like taking classes in different disciplines, interning in varying career fields helps reveal your true interests. More importantly, it allows you to cross off careers and jobs that you've realized might not be for you after all.

2. It looks good on your resume.

I'm going to be honest, one of the reasons why I decided to finally take the plunge and start interning this summer was to make my resume more appealing. According to a study by Southwestern University in Texas, students who completed at least one internship during their time in college were 13 percent more likely to obtain a full-time employment than those who did not. The truth is that an increasing number of seemingly “entry level” jobs require a couple of years of experience, which is why it's a good idea to start raising that experience meter early on. And there's no better way to do that than having an internship. While most students seem to intern in their junior and senior years of college, it doesn't hurt to start working during the first two years of college. Some companies even hire highly-qualified high schoolers! Starting early will also help open up more options come graduation in terms of job opportunities, cool companies to work at, and places to live in.

3. It’s an excuse to live in a new city.

Although I live in DC to go to college for most of the year, going to work here is a far different experience from going to school here. Within the last month I've already seen so much more of the city than I did in the past year. I've also gotten much friendlier with the metro system, in addition to becoming more comfortable with visiting new places alone and exploring different neighborhoods. I'm looking forward to interning in either New York or San Francisco (or maybe even a different country!) before I graduate. 

4. It teaches you new things about yourself.

Some of the most helpful things I’ve learned in the past few weeks include my strengths and weaknesses, as well as my career-related likes and dislikes. I’ve learned that I love creating visual content, whether it’s quote cards or other images to put out on social media. On the other hand, I don’t love doing social engagement as much, which means going on Twitter and Facebook. This whole process of learning little facts about myself on the way is, in my opinion, the most powerful aspect of interning. Similarly to what I said in Reason #2, I’m able to save myself time and energy working jobs I might not enjoy in the future to instead focus on projects I’m passionate about.

5. It’s a fantastic way to meet people. 

From your boss and fellow interns, to other employees, you'll meet people that you wouldn't have otherwise crossed paths with through your internship. And you don't have to limit meeting new people to the workplace. There's always events, conferences, informational interviews, and tons of other networking opportunities you can find on places like Eventbrite, Creative Mornings, and Meetup. I actually recently attended a workshop in DC through General Assembly, and ended up meeting an industry leader who I'm sure will be a great mentor for me into the future!

Grow in Dog Years

After many years of traveling, living abroad, and continually challenging myself to try new things, something I've realized is that, it’s not traveling that I truly enjoy; its personal growth that comes with getting outside of your comfort zone. Why? Because when we travel time becomes distorted. One day in a foreign country can forever change the way that you think about life. One week trekking through the amazon, or taking a road trip will often be more impressionable on you than a year in university. A few months working abroad can forever shape what you want out of your career and your life.

I believe that anytime someone puts themselves outside of their comfort zone, it leads to an accelerated hyper growth; what I now refer to as “growing in dog years”. In the same way that a dog theoretically ages 7 years in a year, I believe that when we travel, try new challenging things, and get outside of our comfort zones, we grow at a more rapid pace; we grow in “Dog Years”.

You see, when we get outside of our comfort zones and try new things, we realize that time is not created equally. When time is maximized, and we pack as many overwhelming experiences into a short period of time, we grow at an accelerated rate because, quite simply, we experience more. The more that you experience, the more that you grow.

This is why when we return home from our travels it is so hard to relate to our friends. So much has taken place for us in the last year, but for them their lives have remained essentially the same. They might have a new job, or a new girlfriend/boyfriend, but in reality their lives haven’t changed much throughout the course of that last year. They haven’t experienced the same intensity and acceleration of growth because quite simply, they haven’t experienced as much.

In my opinion, it is simply because you have grown more than they have in that same year. You have had more experiences. You have learned more things. You have widened your perspective in a way that they haven’t. So you are literally no longer at the same points in your life, you have accelerated your own growth and are now years ahead of where they are. In the same year that they grew only one year, you have grown probably 3-4x what they have.

Have you ever been in a position where you look back at the last 6 months and say to yourself, “I feel like the last six months have passed by in the snap of a finger, but at the same time so much has happened and it feels like an eternity ago!” This happens because you packed new experiences into your life, which made time pass by seemingly fast, but these experiences also accumulated at an insanely fast pace, making it seem like an eternity has passed. It’s quite the contradictory feeling.

I look at it like “hacking time”. If you want to get the most that you can out of your life, your goal should be to pack in as many new experiences as you possibly can into every year. If you look back on the last year of your life, how many new things did you try? How many impressionable events can you name? How many times did you take a new trip somewhere? How hard did you push yourself at work? How many new skills did you pick up? The more things you can list out, the more that you have grown.

Take something like Vipassana meditation for example. Although it might be a mere ten days long, in those ten days you will experience years of personal growth because it is such a novel and challenging experience. When you come out, you have grown more in the last ten days than your friends who didn’t do it with you.

Unfortunately, I also think that it’s necessary to touch on hardship, because hardship has a way of manipulating time, but in a bad way. Hardships and struggle have the potential to cause adverse growth. They have the ability to debilitate people and slow life down.

Hardships have a tendency to debilitate people. Something bad happens, and we sit in our rooms and sulk. We stop working. We stop moving forward. We stop growing. Months can pass in this way. Have you ever had a friend go through a failure and take months to get over it? Or a friend who broke up with a girlfriend/boyfriend and they take a year to get over it? Or, in the worst case scenario, the death of a family member? Situations like these have the ability to slow or entirely halt your growth, and it is important to be cognizant of this.

Hardships and struggle have the potential to either debilitate or motivate, and it is up to us with how we handle these hardships. We can either use them as an opportunity to grow, or a time to recess. Am I saying that if something bad happens ignore it and keep moving? Absolutely not. I am instead saying that with every struggle comes an opportunity for growth, and in the end it’s up to you how long you let that struggle knock you on your ass, or get back up and keep fighting.

Where positive experiences speed life up and cause one to say “time flies when you’re having fun”, negative experiences have the ability to slow life down and make it seem like it passes forever. Have you ever noticed that when you are in a bad mood the day seems to pass by incredibly slowly? Or remember back to those days of sitting in a classroom and staring at a clock waiting for time to pass, and then you go outside for recess and it feels like you didn’t get enough time to play? Funny how time becomes distorted depending on our mindset and how we are perceiving our experience of said time.

This is why it is so important to schedule things into your year that will have the maximum impact on your growth. This is why it is so important to choose a challenging career path, travel and work abroad when the opportunity arises, and jump at novel experiences every time you get the chance. It’s like the phrase “getting the best bang for your buck”, but instead I look at it as, “get the most shine for your time” ;) (ok ok I’m working on it!)

Time is not created equally. It’s up to you how you spend your time on this planet, and how fast or slow you want to grow. You have the ability to grow like everyone else, or grow in dog years. Personally, I choose to get the most out of every day that I am here on this planet and grow in dog years, and I encourage everyone else to do the same :)

See What Sticks: An Unconventional Partnership

Hi everyone, Amma Marfo here. Two quick things about me that you’ll need to know before we begin:(1) I am a reader. I am a library-loving, constant tome-carrying, unapologetic bibliophile. (2) If there’s anyone you will meet who can connect what she’s reading to the world around her, it’s me. As such, I want to dedicate my time in this space to sharing with you what I’m reading, and how it could inform a budding professional’s daily life.

Pat Sajak and Vanna White. Batman and Robin. Lucy and Ethel (sometimes). History and pop culture are littered with examples of powerful duos, hard at work to make the world better (or, in the case of Lucy and Ethel, more filled with chocolate). So often, we distill the stories behind creative excellence down to a moment of brilliance in one person (think Newton's revelation of gravity), or farm it out to a group through exercises like brainstorming. But Joshua Wolf Shenk's Power of Two splits the difference of those two long-held tenets, making the case for excellence as a pair.

He explores the accomplishments of collaborators like The Wright Brothers and the DaVinci brothers, comedy writers and producers Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles. Alternatively, he explores the power of rivalries as well, and how the relationship between competitors like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys brought out the best work in each. But in the most emotional part of the book, Shenk walks us through his final deadline for the very book we're reading...and the struggle he's having in the absence of such a powerful collaborative relationship.

I've been lucky enough to have a few people in my life that have given me the "power of two," each in a different season of my career. I can attest that there are projects I wouldn't have finished, ideas I would have doubted, and praise I would have shrugged away if not for the presence of strong, caring, and brilliant co-conspirators. The perspective of a dedicated partner can help you articulate your thoughts, can compassionately redirect you when you're feeling lost, and can cheer you on when your motivation is flagging. In the absence of that help from a trusted friend and second mind, some ideas would never take root. So my heart goes out to Shenk- writing a book about the power of creative relationships, all while searching for his own creative "other half."

As he chronicles his race to the deadline, he highlights a few strategies to create the kinds of partnerships that yield significant work:

Try.

Connection will not swoop down on you like a hawk seizing a mouse, and even if it does come toward you like a boat while you're floating in the ocean, you will still need to grab the rungs of the ladder and climb onto it, and the first step may not be the hardest, but it is, often, the wildest.

I love that Shenk follows this statement with, "find a stranger who gets you or a friend you think is strange." Sometimes, partnerships start when people realize they have a lot in common- these are the ones that are the easiest to cultivate. However, there's also tremendous benefit to working alongside people who are quite different from you. One of my most successful creative partnerships, with my friend and colleague from graduate school, came about because our personalities are different enough that we decided to present on it. Further, one of my current creative partnerships works well because my partner and I are each good at very different, but complementary, things. In both cases, each party took a leap to get involved- it's a little scary to put yourself out there to someone else- but it's often a risk that needs to be taken. As Shenk says, "To try is to risk succeeding."

Accept.

Accept that your partner is a pain in the ass. Accept that you are a pain in the ass, so the two of you are made for each other [...] Accept that the people you need will please you and disappoint you but that the index of the creative experience is not your pleasure or disappointment.

The premise of a partnership- be it platonic, romantic, or creative- isn't based in universal harmony. There are misunderstandings, fights, and even dissolution at points of struggle. But these moments are normal, even necessary, if meaningful work is to appear. Work with your partner to keep the work central, while at the same time being attentive to their emotional needs. Both are important, but they are separate, and each will take priority at different points of the ideation process.

Play Your Part.

The way out of the shackles isn't to find the key of to strain like the Hulk until they burst. The way out of the shackles is to stop believing in them. To play your part, do what you do best. To play your part, talk to someone. Talk to your partner.

We often take on projects or initiatives because we believe them to be important. And this is good, because this is how problems big and small get solved. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't enjoy the ride. Let play be a part of your creating process. Have fun. Some of the breakthroughs that have informed things like a new tool to solve a problem, an analogy to describe a concept, or even the structure of my first book, came when I took time away from the situation at hand to enjoy myself. It invites new perspective, and the distance required to look at our work objectively. Let your partner encourage you to play and create in new ways, you never know how it'll affect your final product!

All of this putting yourself out there, cultivating a relationship that supports the work, and making space to play to ensure solid creative work, will go a long way to help you create work you can be proud of. And when you do, Shenk advises you to keep the partnership going: "finish, or, at least, surrender. Give over the thing that you've both created and start the process over." The world needs what you and your partner have built- now get to the work of doing it all again.

A Quote for Comfort

I've got a few ideas for my debut post here on The Niche Movement. Thoughts about how to nail down what you want to do, about how your career path will most likely not be what you thought, about my personal career journey. But honestly, none of those are resonating with me right now -- and my best writing comes when my heart is locked in with the topic.

So today, I'd like to share a passage that's resonating with me right now. It's from The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money, and Miracles by Marianne Williamson in a chapter titled "Job vs. Calling."

"If you're kind to people, if you're compassionate, if you pour your excellence into whatever you're doing, then you're doing the job God sent you to do. From that will emerge the next form that's needed to host the energies you're bringing forth."

Earlier on the page she says: "...our value, individually, is determined not by what we do but by the consciousness with which we do it."

What I love most about this post, and why it resonates with me right now, is the "from that will emerge" piece. Essentially it says that the next best way for you to use your gifts and talents will present itself to you. You don't have to push, you don't have to force it. You just have to trust that if you show up and use your gifts and talents wherever you are, the next right step will present itself to you.

I hope these passages provide you comfort, acknowledge that if you're doing good work in the world with intention, you're on the right track, even if you're not "there" yet.

Trash Your Goals

When you set goals for yourself, how do you feel? Do you get excited, energized, and ready to take on the world? Or do you become stressed, frazzled, or terrified that you won't live up to the challenges you've set? For some people, goal setting is a dream. For others, a nightmare.

But even if you LOVE setting goals, there are many ways that having rigid goals can actually set you back in your progress towards finding your niche.

Especially in college, and in young adulthood, we're encouraged to set goals for ourselves. To pick a major. To pick a career. To pick a passion. These goals become part of our identities as individuals, and we hold on to them pretty tightly. As an advisor I've worked with many students who held so closely to their goal of going to graduate school or medical school that they continued on that path even when every step was a struggle.

While there is something to be said for that kind of determination and perseverance, it can actually be hurtful for us to become too attached to our goals. We experience disappointment when we don't reach them on time, or don't reach them at all. It becomes a blow not only to our plans, but to our identities. This, I think, is why so many well-meaning friends, family members, and teachers encourage students to aim lower than what they truly want. They are trying to guard against that disappointment by choosing a "safe bet".

Worse, though, than the emotional blow of not achieving our goal, is when we let our goals drown out our own personal truths. Our goals can give us tunnel-vision and stop us from seeing other opportunities that would make us so much happier! As one of my favorite self-help authors, Danielle LaPorte says: "Shouting goals at yourself deafens your truth". When this happens, we may struggle towards a goal, only to reach it and find ourselves unsatisfied.

So what can you do instead?

Start by thinking of your goal. Maybe your goal is to become famous on YouTube, or to start your own company, or to become a pediatrician. Have you thought of your goal? Great!

Now, picture yourself after you have achieved your goal. What does it look like? How will you feel? Successful? Free? Powerful? Loved? Perfect!

Now throw your goal in the trash! Because ultimately, that feeling is the REAL goal.

We assume that we feel good because we have reached our goals, but in truth, the FEELING is the goal.

If your goal is aligned with your truth, you will experience that feeling all along your journey while working to reach your goal. You will feel successful as you complete your pre-med coursework. You will feel free as you make your own choices and decisions, and work to build your own business from the ground up.

If you're not getting those feelings, adjust your path until you are!

Life is not waiting for you at the end of your finish line. It's happening now. And every moment you spend doing what feels like "work" towards your goal? That's the life you're living. So trash your goals, and focus on feeling the way you want to feel.

I guarantee you will reach more goals, and have a better time doing it!