Been feeling very reflective lately.

It’s the start of my senior year of college which is just insanely crazy. Believe me, I will be writing many posts about this and be gushing about it for the rest of the year. But in this post, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on this period in my life that I’ve just gone through. This past week has been what I’m calling the last rays of summer sunshine which is just my fancy way of talking about the last few weeks of summer.

This past summer I did my first big corporate girl internship, and not to be dramatic, but it was the best summer of my life. I loved it and this transition back to school life has been so strange after experiencing a little taster of adult life. In the past few months I spent my second summer out here in DC, moved into a house for the first time, dealt with all the adult house stuff (like many mice being caught in traps and a gnat infestation), and worked my first in-person corporate job. My life over the past few months just feels so different to anything that I’ve experienced before; I’ve loved it so much and it just feels strange to immediately transition back to college life and to school.

I’ve always considered myself someone who loves school. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I get stressed and sometimes school can be overwhelming, but for the most part I love learning and I enjoy the structure and purpose that school gives me. Since starting college, I’ve also found so much joy from living on a university campus and being able to bump into friends or hang out whenever we want. At the end of my junior year, my older sister graduated from Georgetown, and I remember thinking that the next year (my senior year) was going to be so bittersweet as I couldn’t imagine even feeling ready to leave here. However, after this summer I think that my perspective has shifted.

I went into my internship this summer hoping for the best, but kind of just expecting that I would put my head down, work really hard, and hopefully enjoy the work. I went in knowing that this internship was probably the kind of work I wanted to do post-graduation, but I didn’t expect to experience much outside of the work. I was so wrong. I feel like the work I did and the skills I learned are only a small sliver of what I was able to walk away with this summer.

Coming back to school after this internship, I’ve been able to recognize a newfound confidence in myself and my abilities. Now in my senior year, I think back to my freshman year and how scared I was that I wasn’t smart enough to be at Georgetown. Even at certain points last year, I remember seriously doubting my abilities. In my internship this summer, I think I was super nervous at the beginning that I didn’t belong there, but the amount of mentorship and support I got in that experience pushed me to start feeling more confident in my abilities and instead of thinking “am I good enough?” I began thinking “oh I can use my abilities to add value in xyz way.” It was a transition from feeling unconfident to feeling confident in what I knew and what I could do and looking to see how I could make that useful. It’s something that I didn’t realize was happening along the way, but that has become very apparent to me now that I’m back at school.

Another thing that I walked away from this internship with was just an amazing group of new friends and connections which is what has made this transition back to school so difficult. I don’t know how to explain it, but somehow the company that I worked for has found a group of the most amazing people and brought them together. Everyone older than me was so willing to share their time and advice with me and my fellow interns are just the best group of people I could have met. I feel like I was able to find this place where I could fully be myself – where I could nerd out, make jokes, talk about Taylor Swift all day, and do all the things I love – and be fully accepted AND find people who match that energy; I don’t even think I’ve fully found that at Georgetown. It’s going to sound fake, but that office is full of a lot of my new favorite people. Leaving that and coming back to school has been the hardest part of the transition! Yes I sort of found my people at college, but not an entire office of them! I’ve never liked the drama, but coming back and dealing with the petty college drama and gossip just feels so silly now.

And lastly, something else that I learned over the summer was just what adult life will be like. I don’t want to sound naive, I know adult life will get difficult with all the responsibilities and real life stressors, but the taster of what I got in the summer makes it so hard go back to school. I loved my routine of going into work everyday and feeling like I’m doing something valuable and bringing something to the team. Even though days could be long, I liked that the only thing I had to focus on was work; not class, homework, part-time jobs, career development, and a side-hustle. And I absolutely loved having a weekend. From the many week in the life posts I’ve done over the years, you’ll know that at college my whole entire weekend is jam packed with school work and commitments, and for once it was really nice to close my laptop and just feel like I had so much time over the weekend! It wasn’t even like I would do anything crazy – I would just take time to rest, go to my favorite workout class, grab a bite to eat with a friend, go for a nice walk, just the simple things, but what made it so special was that I had time to do them!

Honestly, college starting back up again had me in a little bit of a slump after such an amazing summer and this very different day-to-day life. But already with classes starting and bumping into lots of friends on campus, I know that there are these aspects of college life that I’ll miss so much when I graduate. I guess no one ever talked about what that abrupt transition from a taster of being an adult back to college life is like – I did not expect it to hit so hard!

We’re now at the end of my first week of senior year and it sort of just feels like I’m at college but I feel oddly detached, maybe it’s just an early onset of senioritus? We’ll see! I’ll keep you updated on my journey throughout senior year!

See you next week,