My Experience by @ReidBtntheLines

It’s Jackie the Intern writing my last post as a TGAW intern! It’s been fun and more than that, it’s been real. What has this experience taught me, well as a whole I know that success comes in small strides and that nothing is handed to you, rightfully so. Internships, while they allow getting more “experience,” they are also to make you more knowledgeable and sure if this is what you really want to do with your life. While this philosophical stand point remains, so are your bills, transportation and day to day living fees you MUST face while being a real life human being. LOL I definitely have a love/hate relationship with the idea of internships but overall it’s the only way you can prove that you are worth it. Let’s face it, with the right amount of money, the perfect combination of friends, minimum school work, parties and boys to balance out the stress, we can all survive four years of college with a smile and a drop of sweat trickling down our forehead to give the expression that the fight was hard! It’s after graduation day when you start trying to figure out the point of certain classes and remember what your advisor told you to take the next step. From my experience can I just say “STOP!” Everyone has an opinion, every book swears it has the right answer, and every advisor has the perfect story where they seem to never be lost and found their way back to a University to guide you to what they believe is success. (Roll eyes) ….. The only one who knows the best way for you to become successful is you, being that everyone’s definition of success is different. I was talking to a friend of mine and he told me, “Jackie I just don’t want to become this guy who’s like everyone else and is average, working a 9-5 and …” well then I cut him off lol. I said that all those average people you speak of didn’t start out average, matter of fact they all at a point had the chance to fulfill a dream and become that vision you have for yourself, “above average.” I think we all are born special, I genuinely believe that. I think that God gave us each a talent to lift off with and use it to get us far in life as well as set us apart from everyone else. The average person takes that talent, creates a dream for themselves and does just that, continue to dream because they are not ready to prove to the world that they embody such a talent that their ready to struggle till it gets the recognition it deserves to blossom into something great. Then there is a person who is just like that other guy, except they are ready to fight. That person takes that talent, creates a dream for themselves and then constantly creates efforts to try and try to make a way for that dream to become a goal. Then that goal turns into their life, and then almost effortlessly they live and breathe that goal that was only once a dream. To become your dream, there is no way for it not to become your reality, and in turn, your success, and this my friend is the person who then becomes “above average.” So you ask what I learned from this experience. I learned more about myself and I found by far that I am above average, with the bills and Penn State loans knocking on my door, I’ll find a way to make it work, lol I have no choice, but I will never let my goal get deferred. It does not deserve that.

I do not deserve that.