This is my last dilemma. After three years of writing this column and many, many quandaries, my time with the wonderful Your Weekend section is drawing to a close.
I had always envisioned my last column as being something profound and poetic, deserving of positive reception and acclaim, or evocative of surprised responses such as “I didn’t know they gave the Pulitzer for undergraduate newspapers!”
At the very least, I expected to do a reflective montage of sorts in the manner of series finales of sitcoms in the 1990s, reviewing highlights of my career as a columnist, complete with wavy font to make it seem more like a dream sequence.
But now, my real dilemma is that I cannot live up to these expectations, nor do I have the time to try as the end of school approaches and work piles on more than ever.
Therefore, I will stick with what I do best and tackle one last dilemma this week: How to deal with the end of school . . . and beyond.
As the end of college approaches for the few, and as the end of classes dawns for the many, hours seem short and the demands seem high.
This is pretty normal for campus, but add a dash of allergies and a few days of nice weather, and suddenly the grind takes on new meaning.
It’s the final push, the final struggle before the floodgates of summer fling open, and we are unleashed in our wiped-out state on whatever comes next: summer jobs, internships and, for the chosen few, financial independence and doom.
If you’re still looking for things to do for the summer, here are a couple tidbits I picked up along the way that might help you in your quest.
Baltimore is a great city for college students.
I can’t speak to the math and sciences end as much as I can to the humanities, but there are tons of great internship opportunities at Baltimore publications and institutions and you don’t need to have a “daddy” to get your foot in the door.
Visit websites and send out feelers and you’ll get a bite.
On a broader note, talking to professors and looking for opportunities on campus are both other amazing resources that not nearly enough people take advantage of.
Granted, we are at our core a research institution, but it is guaranteed that if a professor is teaching at Hopkins, they have some work experience — it’s not only the biology professors sending kids to work in their labs.
Reach out to professors and they will help you network. Don’t be shy, the teachers want to hear from their students and showing an interest can be mutually beneficial.
Also, you don’t need to have an internship over the summer to get into grad school, get a job, etc.
You can just go home and hang out with your friends and work at the day camp you have worked at since junior year of high school. There’s plenty of time to get work experience during the semester.
Even if all your computer science friends are going to Google to earn thousands of dollars, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure.
The truth is, you might as well just be a kid while you have your parents’ support. It does pay off to graduate with a stacked résumé, but if it doesn’t seem worth it to you personally, it probably isn’t.
The last thing I want to say isn’t really about summer, but it’s my last piece of advice as a columnist and I think it’s good, so I’m going to slip it in here.
Before you graduate, find at least one thing on campus that you can throw your heart into. It only takes one thing that you can look back on and say “I left this better than how I found it” to not have regrets about your college experience.
And with that, I’m signing off.
Thank you so much for your support over the years.
