What Would You Do?
Tiamat – “Love In Chains”
Okay, hypothetical situation:
You are currently a student at a design school. The workload is quite large, and you frequently feel overwhelmed with everything you have to do in the little time you have to do it in. In the coming term you are going to be graduating, which means stressful things like creating your portfolio, working out your identity/branding and collateral (business cards, letterheads, etc.), and preparing for the “real” world, not to mention the actual work in the rest of your classes. You already work part-time and will be registered for four classes (!) that term (many people try to keep it to only two or three). Just recently, you have received an offer to intern at a well-known design agency.
Several people you went to school with and consider friends work at Well-Known Design Agency, some of whom interned there to begin with. It would be a paid internship, with the possibility of it turning into a full-time job upon graduation (or even prior to graduation).
However, Well-Known Design Agency is located 60 miles from where you currently live, and you do not have a car. You could probably scrape up some money for a crap one, but you’d also have to think about parking issues/costs, gas, car maintenance (especially if it is sort of crap to begin with), licensing, and possibly even insurance for your significant other because he/she is not currently insured to drive.
Do you:
A) Take the internship. A chance like this doesn’t come very often. Figure that you’ll either buy a car or try to locate someone in the city who won’t kill you/rape you/kidnap you to carpool with. You’ll also force yourself to become great at time management and great at maintaining your own mental stability in the midst of all of this.
B) Take the internship, but know in your heart that you’ll end up stretching yourself thin for the next term, doing poorly in school, and generally feeling awful mentally. Though, might the job be worth having three awful months in a row?
C) Turn down the internship knowing that you, at this time in your life, would not be able to hack it with your current job, school workload, and the commute issue. Figure something better (ie., closer) will come along.
D) Turn down the internship, but regret it later because it was a wonderful opportunity that you passed by. Hate self forever; become someone who LIVES in a VAN down by the RIVER.
Please comment and let me know what you would do. Feel free to offer alternatives.
5 Comments
That is a really heavy workload, I can see where you are having trouble deciding.
What if you were to quit your at school job? That would free 20 hours a week.
How many hours would the internship be and would the money from it be able to cover your cost of living + projected cost of gas/parking?
That is the first thing that comes to my mind.
Firstly, the options provided are really only two different choices… listing four is an irresponsible way to conduct this survey, and I believe you will have a dissproportionate number of votes toward the categories that end up less-negative. It’s BIASED I tells ya! BIASED!
So now that that’s over… I’d definitely recommend quitting your job at the PSC. I’m positive that the internship would both be more lucrative, and more valuable to you professionally… I’m pretty sure I know where it is that you got offered the job, and wouldn’t it be fun to work with J?
The car issue is rough… I dunno, I know that there are carpool options and whatnot available in the area. I’m sure that other people in your neighborhood have to trave out that way… maybe…
And about your workload. I think it would be benefical to maybe delay your graduation by perhaps only taking 2 classes for the next two terms. This would allow you to take this internship more easily, and enable you to really spend the time you need to spend on your final pieces of work so that when you graduate you’ll have a stronger book to break out into the “real world” with.
I don’t know what other factors are ridiing on your graduation date, but if it’s not a big deal that you graduate this term I’d suggest waiting for one quarter.
But yeah… there’s my two cents…
I would not spread myself too thin, especially with graduation so close at hand and the pressure this person might sometimes put on herself to get really excellent grades…
Now I don’t know you, and I live in the UK so I don’t know the socio-political climate there, but here’s what I think:
Do not take the internship if you do not 100% believe you can complete it, regardless of how you adjust your life to fit it in. You would only feel worse if you went in to it unsure if you could hack it and didn’t hack it.
Is there any chance they might defer the internship if you explained your current workload? Surely they’d be more interested in an intern who has no other distractions such as school. Just a thought. It can’t hurt to talk to them.
Does Portland have flexcar? If so, you should look into that.