On Learning to Be Patient

They say you should never pray for patience, because you'll get your answer and then some. I've always been good about taking this advice. But sometimes it doesn't matter if you ask for it or not--something I learned the hard way this summer.

While it's been an incredibly fun summer (I mean, I'm living in in New York City. Let's get real.), it has also been, without a doubt, the most stressful four months of my life.

Both unmarried and wanting to get the heck out of dodge after graduation, I somehow felt that NYC was the place I needed to go. I knew upon moving here that it wasn't going to be easy. Yet I'm the kind of person that always has a plan. Sophomore year--go on a study abroad. Junior year--get an internship. After graduation--get a rad PR job in an industry that I love in the best city in the world.

If only it was so simple. I felt like I did pretty well for myself in college, but because of this people seemed to expect a lot from me. Everyone would tell me, "You're going to be so successful!!" Yeah, no pressure.

Upon graduation I had only an unpaid, two-month internship to look forward to. It was at an excellent PR agency working with clients in my preferred industries, but so much was still uncertain. What if I didn't like it? What was I going to do afterward? Why did I choose the most expensive city to break into anyway? So many questions and doubts swirled in my head before I left for New York.

Luckily I loved my time at this agency. I really enjoy media relations work and proved that I had actually learned some valuable stuff in college. But they weren't hiring at the time I finished. And so I was stuck.

After the internship ended there was that week of limbo where I tried to play it off--I'm unemployed! I can watch Netflix and stay in my pajamas all day! But of course I was terrified. And very quickly becoming broke.

I probably applied to twenty different places, and went in for several informational interviews, before I serendipitously found my current internship. My boss found me on a job search website and reached out to me (I had never heard of this happening before) and it sounded like a good gig. I was able to appreciate the irony of getting the only job I hadn't actually applied for. But it was only part-time, and I could maybe last until the end of August on my current savings. After that it was back home to mom and dad, and most likely, Utah. An embarrassing scenario, to be sure.

But I still tried not to despair. After a couple hours of freaking out, I looked into freelance work. I heard of some people getting good work that way. I checked out odesk.com and got a couple small jobs. Even my boss had a really awesome side business he needed PR help with. I wasn't making a ton of money off of any of this, but it was enough, and it gave me some great experience.

August started. I started freaking out some more. Making it worse, I had signed a year-long lease in Brooklyn on a crazy instinct. Then my current internship said they couldn't think of hiring full-time until mid-October. I like working here, but I couldn't really deal with that. I decided to bug my old agency one last time...and this time it worked.

I'm excited to start my new position at Goodman Media International. It'll be my first big-girl job, and I know it will put me on the right track for where I want to go in the future. But I had to learn a lot of lessons this summer to get to this point. I learned to be patient. To be persistent. To think outside the box when all seems hopeless. And that for some crazy reason, I'm meant to be in NYC at this time.

So that's my story of the summer. I'm both happy and sad that it's coming to a close. I'm definitely ready to start the next chapter in my life. Let's let post-grad life begin already!!