Sitting here drinking a matcha (obviously) at a major crossroads weekend in my life. It’s my first homecoming weekend as a Georgetown alum but I also start my first ever job this coming Monday! If you didn’t go to school in the US you may not know what homecoming is, but it’s a weekend when universities typically invite back alumni from all years to celebrate the first home game of the season. It was a fun weekend of getting back that “college experience” of running into random friends all around campus that I’ve missed since I’ve graduated college. I’ve been pretty good at reuniniting and staying in touch with my college friends, but very rarely after you graduate do you get that experience of being in the same place as most of your graduating class again. At the same time it’s also wierd to be experiencing this throwback to college when I start my first ever job this coming Monday! It’s like one final hurrah before I start the routine I’ll be in for the rest of my life.
People have been asking me if I’m nervous for starting this new era and starting work, and my answer has been, “I’m not really nervous but I feel like I should be nervous because it’s such a monumental moment, so that’s actually making me kind of nervous.” Sort of a weird answer, but I feel like this is such an important day in my life that I should be feeling all of these anxious feelings! But really, I feel as though I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time and while I know that I’m saying goodbye to the “carefree child in college” era and entering the “adult with responsibilites era” I think I’m ready. I think I’ve always been someone who has been yearning for this stage of life, and I wrote about it a few blog posts back, but I think I’ve been waiting for this period of my life where I can live in my adult apartment and be in the routine of a job and all the excitement that comes with that! I know I’m saying goodbye to a lot of things and maybe that’s why this weekend feels like it should be more of a big deal than it is to me in this current moment, but I’m also saying hello to lots of exciting moments (and challenges) that I’ll be experiencing soon!
Since this is a weird weekend of bridging my last Georgetown hurrah with starting my first job, I thought I’d do something fitting and reflect back on what each year of Georgetown taught me and take those lessons to this new period of my life.
It is weird to think back to freshmen year; that year of living at home in Dubai and doing college online during the middle of a pandemic when none of us knew what the future would look like. The 4am wakeups for Zoom and making friends online seem like a completely different life now and it is fun to reminisce on that with friends that I made during that time and think about how far we’ve come. In that first year of school it took me a while to really believe that I belonged there. I couldn’t quite grasp the fact that I was smart enough to be at Georgetown and I felt like everytime I spoke up in class it was part of some sort of test to see if I could really be there and fit in with all of these intellectuals. I remember taking my first class for my major and debating if I should completely switch majors because I thought I wasn’t smart enough to be in that class; fast forward four years and I actually graduated with honors in my major so look how far we’ve come! I think the big lesson I take from that first year of school is learning to ground myself and believe that I’m smart enough to be there. I learned to tune out some of the voices in my head and tell myself to just push through, work hard, and that I had earned a place there. I have no doubt that this is a lesson that I am going to channel as I start a new job. The first few weeks are bound to be overwhelming and just like I did in my first year of school, I’m going to have to put my head down, block out some of the voices, and tell myself I belong there.
Sophomore year was maybe the craziest year I had at Georgetown. It was my first time moving away from home but with more intense academics and expectations of being in the second year of college. I was so homesick for so long and it was really hard to focus on everything else going on in the moment while I felt that way. Sophomore year taught me a lot about resillience and how to pick myself up after a bad day; it taught me to think about what I needed and to be more in tune with my emotions. I learned to recognize when to give myself a break after a particularly bad day and when to tell myself “you’re being a little dramatic” when I got sad after something small. I learned how to treat myself after achieving something big and how to say “well done” to myself which is something I’ve always struggled with. It was also a year of learning to become comfortable on my own and with my own thoughts; while I barely had any alone time in college, something important I learned was how to navigate through all of the big thoughts I did have swimming in my head in those rare moments alone. From Sophomore year I think I can take the lesson of being in tune with my feelings and emotions and taking a moment to think about what I need in order to feel better in that moment instead of spiraling into full blown panic of “this is the worst day ever” or “everything is going completely wrong.”
Junior year was an interesting year because while I had gotten over my homesickness and feeling like I belonged at Georgetown, I still struggled with constantly comparing myself to others. I was in this position where everything was familiar – I knew my way around campus and I had my routines but I still felt like I was always wondering about things like if I was doing enough, if I had gotten the same grade as my friends in the same class, and if I gave enough time to other people all while still trying to balance academic responsibilities. For me, Junior year was a discovery in learning about my “point of difference.” I wrote a post about this a while back, but junior year was the point in my college career where I truly reflected on what made me feel the most fulfilled and what I felt like I could bring to the table and really focused on that instead of constantly thinking about everyone else. Instead of making comparisons, I feel like in Junior year I learned to focus more on myself and this “point of difference” or what I could bring to the table in any class, volunteer oppportunity, or extra curricular. It was this revelation of realizing that I’m here for a reason and I bring something to this situation that no one else does and instead of comparing myself to everyone else and let me just focus on doing what I can do best. This is a lesson that I know I’ll have to take to my new job with me because it will be so hard not to compare myself to others during the first year and I just have to remember why I’m there and what I can add!
I’ve written about Senior year a lot on this blog, but it was a fun year of just trying new things and having fun experiences that I had always put second to academics for so long. In my senior year I learned to give myself a break and do the things that I want to do and not feel guilty that I was not constantly studying or working towards some goal. I learned to enjoy the fruits of all the work I had previously done. I feel like this will be a really important lesson for me moving foward. While I know the postgrad life is going to be a lot of work, I also think that a lesson I can take from Senior year is knowing when to say yes to a fun opportunity simply because I want to and knowing when I deserve to take a break. Obviously I won’t be taking breaks all the time or doing crazy things every weekend, but I think for someone like myself, it’s important to remind myself that I can do that every once in a while!
There’s a quote about how every moment in time is a culmination of all the small moments that got us to this point and that’s exactly how I feel about starting something new from next week. While it’s nerve wracking and seems like a completely new experience, I can remind myself that I am so equipped to face this will all of the experiences that have already gotten me to this point!
So with that, I begin this new chapter and of course I’ll take you along!
P.S. if you’re an OG reader, you’ll recognize the featured photo for this blog post as one of the photos that I took after my freshmen year of college (before I started showing my face on this blog!)
See you next week!
