Okay, so The Parent Trap also happens to be my favorite movie.

The summer after freshman year is looming, and while the new season brings the promise of warm weather (unlike springtime in Providence), some of you 2016ers are still scrambling to secure post-May 17th plans. For four years, however, I’ve highly anticipated Summer 2013 – the summer I will finally be of age to work at the all-girls camp I attended for six summers. My friends can vouch for how much I incessantly talk about adore this place. But this winter, despite already having signed the counselor contract, I had a few weak moments of self-doubt. I felt pressured to do something a bit more “legit,” socially acceptable, serious, resume-worthy, etc.

Maybe, just maybe, if I were lucky, the CareerLAB gods and goddesses would send down an internship, which would affirm that history, political science, public policy, urban studies whatever I’m planning to declare is the right concentration for me. My decision to work in Maine felt more like a juvenile risk and an excuse not to go to CareerLAB inteview for a “real” job/internship.  But after reading a NYT article (I promise I don’t regularly read the NYT parenting blog) and some sort of epiphany, I realized that I seriously needed to STFU stop letting societal and self-pressures influence me.

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Other than checking my Bank of America statements online, I don’t really get many reality checks abroad. I go about my days eating bread, drinking wine, and watching non-French TV on non-French websites. It’s a simple life, really. Until I go on Facebook, and read about so-and-so’s internship in New York/D.C./San Francisco this summer. I scoff, take another swig of wine, and think, “Ha. Internships.”

And then I think, “Shit. Internships.” The most dreaded yet sought after word in a college student’s vocabulary. I thought studying abroad would allow me to disconnect myself from the stress of on-campus life (i.e. conversations in the Blue Room about interviews on Wall Street; “daddy’s friend” helping someone out during the job search; the endless stream of Career Lab e-mails). Instead, I get brief but painful reminders that I’m graduating next May and will be forced to become a real person, and it’s terrifying. [Read more →]

The Brown Barrel is an alliance of Brown’s written and performance comedy groups. This column runs twice a week. The first is short written humor, the second foretells upcoming comedy events.

Internship Application Decision

Hilary,

After reviewing your application and résumé, we believe that you are, by almost all accounts, an excellent candidate for the summer internship position at Twitter this summer. You seem bright and driven, and you have obviously put in time to learn many of the key skills necessary for the field of new media. However, it is important that you realize that the decisions you make about how you represent yourself online are absolutely fair game for employers like us to use in deciding between similar candidates.

What concerns us specifically is your Facebook profile. We tried clicking on everything, but it seems that you have some kind of privacy restriction in place that prevents us from seeing anything but your profile picture. What are you trying to say with this over-the-top security, Hilary? That you’re too cool to let us see your pictures? That you’re ashamed to show your full personality to the world? That you have something to hide? The field of new media is all about being outgoing, and we hesitate to accept a candidate who seems bent on concealing information.   [Read more →]