A 9-5 job is hard on many levels. The first is that for 22 years of my life I have been going to school. For 18 years, it was roughly 8am-3pm. In college, it’s a few hours here and there each day. These usually include the recess breaks, walking from class to class, taking the occasional nap, spending an hour for lunch, etc. Now, at an internship or job most of us get none of that. Usually you are sitting at a desk for 8 hours, with a 30-minute lunch break. That whole 3pm-slump—that’s a real thing. I can’t tell you the number of times I have almost fallen asleep, but instead I went to the kitchen, grabbed a Red Bull, sometimes two, and pulled myself together for two more hours.
The hard part is all I want to do when I come home from work is watch TV, eat, then sleep. But, alas, I can’t.
After getting up at 6am each morning to go to work and getting home around 5:40, I have about 6 hours left to do all the other things I want to do each day. Read a book, watch TV, go to the gym, and work on my application (see below). Whoops, forgot about dinner and friends. Some days I’m more productive than others. Seriously, how did my parents find time for themselves? For so many years, they would get home from work, go grocery shopping, make us dinner, take us to sports practice and band rehearsal, and tuck us in to bed.
My other job this summer is a task I’ve given myself, well, an opportunity I’m making for myself (hopefully). An application to travel for a year, do research on whatever I want, and receive money to do it. The application is due in mid-September. Time is ticking. I’ve finally settled into a routine at work (four and a half weeks in). I used to get to work an hour or so early, and sit at a coffee shop and do research. Now I just start work at 8am instead of 9am and that hour I gave myself each morning has disappeared. So, when do I have time to figure out which four countries I’m going to visit, where and for how long I will stay, why each one is important to what I want to study, which companies and people I need to talk to, how this will stimulate my interests my personal growth, and my future undecided career? Answer: I have no clue.
Correction: I make time. I push back my sleep, so that I can go to the gym, make dinner, do research, watch an episode of TV, and read my news headlines.