Four Critical Years of My Life

When exactly did my decisions REALLY start to shape the rest of my life?

Honestly, I think about this a lot and have always come back to four critical years of my life. This is junior year of college, senior year of college, and the first two years after graduating college working full-time.

Starting with junior year of college. ‘FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL’ All the school clubs and student orgs come out and try to mass recruit for the upcoming year. I am already in my club but am walking with my friends across the street to the study abroad office and see my good friend from freshman year! He is at a table for his club and there I meet Kuma! Will save our story for another time but in short, meeting Kuma meant that I REALLY REALLY REALLLYYYYY needed to get my act together since I am comparing myself to a straight A 4.0 GPA wizard kid. This is what turned the very first gear…I was thinking about why in the world I decided it was a good idea to be a finance major when I am terrible at math and hate studying! This really hurt my GPA (amongst other things…( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )). Then it hit me. This is clearly NOT what I want for my life so I switched up my major and went into Marketing instead. Making a change this ‘late’ forced me to have to become a ‘super senior’ where I would need one more semester in order to graduate. In hindsight, this is NOT a big deal whatsoever but I can still recall the extreme anxiety I had when I called my dad on the phone and said ‘hey, I am going to change my major to marketing. This means I will need to stay in school for one more semester. Is that OK with you?” Again in hindsight…OBVIOUSLY it was OK ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but knowing that I was fortunate enough to have my dad pay for my tuition, it felt like a HUMONGOUS ask. Here begins one of the most impactful decisions of the four critical years. After changing my major, my grades suddenly shot up and I changed from being a straight B (or even C) student to straight A’s. I knew that in order to get a full time straight out of college I would need real job experience and in my spring semester, I got my first internship ever! This internship was nothing special and it was truly what one thinks of an intern…LOTS of busy work such as organizing binders, creating weekly newsletters, setting up emails, doing market research, and tons of tree killing… aka printing. That being said, it was my first internship EVER and I was so happy to get hired especially with my amazing manager and coworkers.

For senior year in college, I was up on cloud nine dating my boyfriend (now husband) and living the amazing (albeit poor) college student life in New York City! I was interning for an entire year from spring of junior year into spring of senior year until my beloved manager got married and left the company. At that point, I felt ‘OK, I think I’ve done this internship long enough to look good on my resume, lets look for something else…!’Looking back, I have NO IDEA why I would quit without another internship lined up but lo behold that is exactly what I did. Thankfully the job market was good, I now had a 1 year marketing internship for my resume, and it took me 2 months of applying to land my next internship in my super senior last semester EVER of college. Throughout my final few months I was non-stop applying to basically any marketing full-time job I could find online but made it very clear to my internship that I really wanted a full-time offer from them. Through my persistence and strong internship contributions, an offer was made in December and I was officially a college graduate with a full-time offer lined up before graduation. Dream come true! [or not…]

Now we jump to year one of adulting aka the first year ever working – NO MORE SCHOOL! In summary, I absolutely HATED this job. What I did during my internship compared to my full-time were completely different responsibilities and most importantly my manager for the full-time role was a different person. I withstood typical workplace harrassment: getting screamed at with full volume, having colleagues coming to me asking if I am OK, dealing with racist comments, and being told to do tasks with an absolutely impossible timeline. I am NOT an emotional person and I am NOT a crier. I probably only cry three times a year at most…in 2024 I can only remember crying once. Despite my personality being like this, I cried.. A LOT. I even cried to my coworkers at work… It was an incredibly difficult time in my life and every single night as I tried to fall asleep, the extreme anxiety would come over me in fear of having to deal with it all over again each and every single day I went into the office. And just like that – another critical life moment came to me. I GOT LAID OFF less than 4 months into the job! It was like the BIGGEST WEIGHT had lifted and I was FINALLY FREE. Yes, I had no job and no income – but I was finally happy. Thank God for a good job market at the time as I was able to get my next role in one month after applying to over a hundred jobs.

To close out this post… we end with my ‘second year’ of work as I ultimately stayed at this job for a little over two years total. The job I had gotten was AMAZING. I loved my job, my team, the office location, the work culture – just everything. Everything was PERFECT! But this only lasted about 6months into the job. We started out as a team of four analysts/specialists/associates; whatever you want to call an entry level position. At the 6month mark, the company did their first major ‘organizational restructuring’ aka mass layoff and just like that… the team of us four entry level employees turned into ONE – it was just yours truly remaining. Thankfully I had proven myself with a strong work ethic and big contributions – this is what made the company decide to keep me to take over the work of four. This job taught me how to ‘network’ and bond with so many people – no matter the age, industry, or position. It was truly a ‘horizontal’ company and regardless of whether someone was a VP(Vice President), Sales Lead, Engineer, or Marketing Director we would all hang out inside and outside of work. This job taught me resilience as that first mass layoff led to (I kid you not) over ONE HUNDRED rounds of layoffs over the course of the next 1.5 years until I quit. There would be sometimes be multiple rounds of layoffs in a week and this would happen almost every week for a year and a half. It sounds strange and maybe even fake but for global businesses, there are local rules and regulations on when and how much notice must be given to lay off employees so all of this was taken into account. Through ALL of this, I still truly learned a lot and valued every single relationship I had built with the other colleagues within this company. We still keep in touch to this day and I am SO SO SO grateful that I was a part of something so beautiful ♡ . Life will throw you SO many challenges but you NEED TO learn and grow past all of them. If you can’t do this, it will only get harder for you. Thank you for reading my first post ever!

- Gero