After spending the first two hours of my first day of work at Fortune Magazine watching GIF’s of cute cats and butt fumbles, the beige-frame-glasses-wearing adult world slapped me across the face.
Ok, maybe that was a bit too dramatic. But it’s not a far cry from the reality. I had been told to “please compile a shortlist of web based stock trading advisories for and by 20-somethings” and to have it be done by 12.
I looked at the clock- it was 11:15. Having only 45 minutes to complete this task was not what set off the panic alarms in my brain. My anxiety had more to do with the fact that of the words just spit at me, I understood only four or five.
I had absolutely no idea what to do. I looked around at the other interns sitting in my cubicle. I saw three weary faces hurriedly slapping away at keyboards. No help was to be found here. These were not boys, these were men; men who hardly had time to explain to me how I was even supposed to begin.
In school, though at times we find our tasks both challenging and banal, we are instructed on how to do them. We might not be listening too closely, but the instructions are there. At 11:15, I found myself with no instruction, no guidance, and worse – consequences.
In those first few moments, I genuinely thought about leaving. Maybe I wasn’t ready for something like this. Maybe this time I bit off a little more than I could chew and should just walk right into my employers office and say, hey, this is what you get for hiring a high school kid.
But I did something else. To my amazement, I started working. I started urgently googling. I taught myself about the history of High Frequency Trading. I learned that use of traditional stock advisement fell about 2.3 percent in 2012 – a phenomena that can be explained by some combination of “Generation Y’s” ability to navigate a computer and ADD. People from our generation have started making their own algorithms to beat Wall Street at its own game.
Things only got crazier from there. After the first few days, daily assignments came less often until they eventually disappeared completely by the second week. I was both confused and slightly annoyed so I asked my resident mentor why this was happening and what I should be doing. I certainly did not want to sit at a desk for 10 weeks doing nothing. He looked confused and straightforwardly replied, “Now it is time to work. Go work. Go chase a storyline, go write something.”
“Forced against the wall, I was able to persevere.”
This put me through a loop. I had become comfortable in the position of gathering information for others, but now I had to create content myself? In school, we students can always expect to be given instruction and direction. Now that these two pillars of education had gone down, I was pretty sure I’d go down right along with them.
But again, just like with the prior assignment, I got it done. And I kept getting assignments done for the rest of the summer. Why? Because I had to.
I learned a few things this summer. One: you will always get a second chance, but if you mess up you won’t see a third. Two: If you don’t know, ask questions. If after receiving answers you still don’t understand, then it is your responsibility to figure it out. Three: don’t apologize for what you can’t control; it makes you sound like you deserve to be apologizing.
Human beings have a remarkable capability of getting things done when the consequences are dire. Forced against the wall, I was able to persevere. There have certainly been times in my academic career when I could have done more – studied more, paid more attention, etc. – but I was never truly forced to complete an assignment. In the real world you absolutely have to do something so you do it, no matter how difficult.
