As I’m writing this blog, I’m watching the soccer match most commonly known as el clásico. If you’re not familiar with this event, it’s when the La Liga giants and decades-long rivals FC Barcelona and Real Madrid play each other. It’s always a big deal, tensions are high, and the two teams couldn’t be different. Madrid is known for its style, flashy playing, and ultra-high-profile celebrity players (Cristiano Ronaldo being #1). Barcelona, while containing similarly insane starpower, is mostly known for being incredibly aggressive, dominating possession of the ball, and basically getting things done.

This clash of the titans is making me think about my summer—a lot. I’ve been in Barcelona mode lately, scheduling interviews and aggressively pursuing jobs and internships. I just landed one, working with the Illinois Attorney General. Yeah me! That Barcelona dominance paid off big time.

But here’s the thing: it’s a part-time internship, and more and more I’ve been sliding into a Real Madrid state of mind. While I can’t wait to start my internship and do really great, important work, I’m going to have time this summer to do something fun and flashy. Another part-time job could serve that purpose: working at a cool store or restaurant, getting some cool cash, hanging out with cool people. Real Madrid is synonymous is my mind with money: they have some of the most expensive players out there with some of the most extravagant lifestyles. While I’m not planning to turn into Sergio Ramos, having some pocket money would certainly be welcome. Did I mention two players in Madrid’s starting lineup are German internationals? Yep—let’s keep the fact that I’m going to need money for my study abroad trip in mind.

Right now, the score is 1:1. Barcelona was winning for a while, but Ronaldo just hammered home a really gorgeous PK that tied the game up. Although I’m a Madridista, I’d like the score to stay tied for my summer/el clásico metaphor to work. I’d like to be able to balance the two sides of my summer, my aggressive internship and my need to have fun and get money. But in the end, can I really go wrong? This is going to be a great summer for me, no matter which part of it takes priority.

Edit: A tie! This bodes well for my superstitious self.

P.S. I suppose I should spend a little more time talking about my internship! The interview I had for it went fantastically, although I was terribly nervous. It was scheduled for 11 AM Central Time, which I realized the day before was 9 AM here. While I’m usually up by that time, I’m not fully functioning until at least 10:30, after I’ve had my coffee and my shower and morning yoga session. So the day of the interview, I set three alarms for an hour beforehand—and managed to sleep through all three! I ended up waking up twenty minutes before, and instead of doing my morning ritual, I jumped around and listened to Shakira until the clock struck 9. Then, the interview: way easier than I expected. I explained certain things on my interview, talked about why I was qualified for the job, and then—the interviewer offered me a position! What luck!

Well, it’s over. After tens of applications, multiple rejection letters, many different versions of the same cover letter, two interviews, and more resume fiascos than I’d like to admit, I’ve rejected one internship and accepted another. Phew… I guess.

Lately I’ve been realizing just how close we are to the end of the year. It feels like just yesterday it was August and I was lugging my suitcases and boxes up the stairs to my new dorm room, and all of a sudden I’m writing final papers and signing forms to get ready for my trip abroad. Just this morning I woke up and realized that this was the last day of the last real weekend of the year. But even though it seems like this year barely happened, looking back on it, I did a lot. Here’s a (short) list of my accomplishments, milestones, and life-changing-events:

1. I tested into upper-division German after teaching myself over the summer and went into my first class with above-average grammar comprehension and a vocabulary gleaned from soccer games and pop songs.
2. I decided to spend my entire junior year abroad. Did I come to terms with it? Not really.
3. I wrote my first real long research paper. 20 pages. Related milestone: nearly died writing my first real long research paper.
4. Went through a mid-college-career crisis, switched advisors twice, cried and moaned and keened for months but eventually came out a calm and collected German major/Political Science minor.
5. Got an internship.
6. Stopped behaving like a freshman.

In short, I grew up. Just writing all of this down, I realized that nearly all of the big events that have happened to me have happened because I took charge and set a path for myself. Even though I still feel like a kid, I’ve realized that I can do things for myself—I can construct big term papers, plan out my course of study, plan out my summer, and really take care of myself! As hard as it is for me to believe, I guess I’m becoming… an adult.

In about six weeks, I’m going to turn 20. I’ll have crossed the line from teenager to adult in the most definite way possible. As bizarre and, um, terrifying as that is to me, I feel like I’ve done enough this year to prepare myself for the long and scary journey of becoming an adult. And I’m sure that next year at this time, if I’m writing down another list of accomplishments, one of those will be “stopped behaving like a sophomore.” Maybe when I’m 20—and a thorough not-teenager any more—I’ll be ready to start acting like an adult and stop looking at adulthood with trepidation.

But right now I’ve got more immediate worries than how I’m going to feel in a year. I’ve got a term paper on Vertigo that isn’t going to write itself (if anyone has any insight into how gradients of darkness and light are used around the Madeleine character, especially in the early part of the film, CONTACT ME) and a whole lot of reading. So: if I talk to you again this semester, bis später. If I don’t, bis mein letztes Jahr. See you senior year!

Julia

Phone interviews are great for a couple of reasons. You can do it in your pajamas. You can do it in bed, with a cup of tea. You can do it with all your notes and talking points at the ready. You can do it in a box, with a fox, Sam I Am!

Keeping all that in mind, though, I’m still nervous about a phone interview I have coming up. (Side note: I have a phone interview coming up! Eee!) I just got an email a couple of days ago from a woman at an office asking me for my availability to “answer a couple of questions.” Of course I can answer a couple of questions! Yeah, I’m available to talk any time before noon Mondays through Thursdays. I’d LOVE to, um, uh, yes. Eep.

A big part of this apprehension comes from the fact that I’m just getting over a pretty nasty cold, and my voice, while miles better from the raspy smoker’s-voice-slash-mice-from-Cinderella-squeak, is still kind of weak. I don’t want to go into this interview coughing and wheezing and hacking away—or worse, that weird low voice that accompanies a clogged nose—but as the date draws nearer and I stay raspy and clogged up, I’m getting a little freaked out. Would you hire someone who sounds like Marcel the Shell’s (http://youtu.be/VF9-sEbqDvU) geriatric uncle? Me either.

I’m also not sure that I’m a very good, well, talker. I’m one of those annoying people who always ends thoughts in “so, um, yeah!” and throws in gratuitous “you know”s and the dreaded “like”s. My greatest fear is that they’ll hit me with a hardball question and I’ll end up hiding my iffy under a sea of filler phrases. While I think I exaggerate my inabilities with the spoken word, this point is a serious concern. Hopefully I’ll be better than one person, at least. Miss Teen South Carolina (http://youtu.be/lj3iNxZ8Dww) I am not.

My last concern: you know those stock interview answers that people always give? You know, like when the interviewer asks for your worst quality, you say you’re overly detail-oriented and tend to micromanage? I am sure that every single employer in every single state gets that answer for that question 99% of the time. I think that is so boring. I’ve spent the past few days thinking of better answers to that question, but everything I think of just makes me sound neurotic and weird, which, well, I’m not. So if they ask me this question, am I better off giving the stock answer or something that stands out a little more that makes me seem kinda bizarre? Keep in mind that the frog voice is going to up the bizarreness ante by 100% or more.

Last last concern: is it really worth stressing out over a phone interview to this extent? I feel like all through the internship search I end up making mountains out of molehills, and this, while a particularly exciting molehill, is nothing I can’t handle—in my pajamas, cozy in my room, in a box, with a fox, in a house with a mouse, Sam I Am Going to Land This Internship.

Ever since I titled my last blog post “I don’t wanna wait,” I’ve had the Dawson’s Creek theme song going through my head. You know the one; it’s Sarah McLaughlan or something, “I don’t wanna wait/for our liiiives to be o-vah…” and it played over the opening credits of one of the most ridiculous TV shows of the late 90’s.

The reason I bring up Dawson’s Creek here, though, is because of its star James Van Der Beek’s website jamesvandermemes.com. At jamesvandermemes, the man who was once Dawson has all sorts of .gifs of himself expressing different emotions. The reason I bring this up is because I have some news for you which I believe can only be fully expressed with the help of some jamesvandermemes.

I am sick.

I sent out my resume with a really egregious typo on it–or rather, a description of a past job that ended mid-sentence. Ooh, is that why I haven’t heard back from anyone yet?

This grant application I’m writing is really difficult.

Since I can’t do more about the first two issues than get plenty of sleep, drink lots of fluids, and pray and pray and pray that they don’t read my resume that closely (and apply to about a million more places with an updated, SPELLCHECKED resume), I’m going to talk about the third one: the grant application. My professor told me about a really sweet grant that students who are studying in Germany are eligible for; you get a bunch of money to do research on a topic relating to German culture. Now, because I’m paranoid and kind of creepy, I’m not going to tell you what my proposed topic is (because one of you is totally going to steal it!), but I will tell you that 1) it’s good, 2) there isn’t a lot of research about it, and 3) I have no idea how to persuade some secret committee to give me a couple hundred bucks to learn more about it.

The way one of my professors described it, a grant proposal should do three things: explain what your starting idea is, where you think it will go, and why it’s an important thing to study. Well, okay, I can do that, but how many pages should I take up? And I should probably say something about how I’d spend the money, right? How detailed should that be? And since there isn’t a lot of research on my topic, I don’t really know yet where I’ll need to go or what I’ll need to do (or who I’ll need to see or what museum I’ll need to get into)—I mean, I have a general idea, but gosh, committee, I’m a little flustered right now!

I think it’s just a matter of the sophomore slump + a continuing low-grade fever that’s making me so stressed out, and once I actually start writing the application things will get much better much more quickly. But starting is always the hardest thing to do, and especially in a completely new form of writing (I’ve never applied to a grant before!) it’s daunting. So wish me luck, dear readers!

Julia

P.S. Also wish me a speedy recovery and merciful intern coordinators. Oh man, oh man; I can’t believe I sent out my resume with half a sentence.

The essays have been written, the resume has been tweaked, the cover letters have been constructed. Internship applications: sent. Nothing to do now but wait.

…and wait. And wait.

It hasn’t been that long since I pressed the “send” button and got my last application out, but I haven’t heard anything. Not even a “hey, we got your stuff” email. I know it’s silly, but the main thing I’ve been thinking is am I being stood up?

Calm down, I’ve been telling myself. It hasn’t been long at all and I’m sure the people who are looking at my application are looking at a million other ones as well. The only thing to do now is be patient and wait for someone to send me an email back. But oh, that’s so much easier said than done.

I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t hoping for some sort of message from one of my potential employers every time I open my inbox. I just want something to let me know that I haven’t been lost in the sea of applications that have been flooding their inboxes. Most of this is just me being impatient, but it’s also my ego: hey! I want to say. I’m a good candidate, and a nice person, and I am good for this job—so pay attention to me!

I think that I’ve been busy so long working on these applications that I’ve forgotten how to let it go. The apps are in, everything’s sent, and I can’t do anything more. Right now my lowly little application is being judged along with everyone else’s in the capable hands of internship coordinators around the country (well, in Chicago and DC.) But it’s hard to accept that everything is out of my hands at this point. I did the best I could, and now I have to trust that my applications looked good enough to land me a job. I just need to accept that I’m in internship limbo at this point, and I can’t do anything about it.

So: things to do while waiting to hear back. My number one activity was to look for more internships, until I realized that I was giving myself undue stress and that doing something crazy, like working for a photography magazine in Myanmar, probably isn’t a terribly good match for me. Homework is obviously a good use of my time. Watching soccer is, too, but it reminds me of how the MLS isn’t hiring (breaking my heart!). Lately, I’ve been working on a grant application, and that’s been taking up a lot of time and requires a great deal of concentration. I won’t go into much detail about it now–that’s for another blog post–but it has distracted me from my empty email inbox.

But like I said earlier: it’s out of my hands at this point, and now it’s about waiting. Even though I do feel like I’ve been stood-up for a date, I have to remember that they’re not that late and I’ve got plenty of time to hear back. But ah! It’s the not-knowing that’s so difficult. Hopefully by my next blog, I’ll have heard back from someone and will have some news for you all. Until then, it’s time to sit back and keep on waiting.