5 Comforting Lies to Tell Yourself When You Didn’t Get the Internship You Wanted
Life is riddled with disappointments, and the fact that you’re enrolled at Brown means that you probably experienced quite a bit of disappointment on Ivy Day your senior year of high school. One of the qualities that best defines a person is whether or not they can bounce back from a loss, and how they do so. Personally, I have always found that the best way to make light of a bad situation is to relentlessly lie to myself until I believe whatever spin I wanted to project onto my situation. With summer looming, I have prepared the five best lies you can religiously repeat to yourself to rationalize the setback of not getting accepted or otherwise missing entrance into that summer position you wanted so bad.
- You’re happy to spend “one last” summer at home
Let’s be honest, that internship position was a pretty serious gig, and were you really ready for such an adult-esque job? Before you have to go out and be a responsible adult, it probably is best to go home to your family and spoil yourself for just one more summer, even if it’s your second or third “last summer." After all, you’ll have plenty of those pesky duties to deal with when (or if) you (manage to) move out and start a career living on your own. Think of being home as being in a class you’re auditing: You can just watch your parents do grown-person things as an independent study.
- There are better ways to make money
Most of those internships don’t pay well anyways and, after all, you need money to finance your education or to save up for a safety cushion for getting started in the real world. You know what pays a heck of a lot better than a lame entry-level position? Making it rich on cryptocurrency. Now obviously Bitcoin is passé, but dogecoin and analcoin seem to be on the rise and ready to turn whatever savings you have into a gold mine. Who knows, you could even become one of those eccentric millionaire guys that clog up your Facebook news feed with their videos about how you need to work harder and give up on human emotions and your mental health to become successful like them.
- You can have so much more fun
Real talk, do you know what’s more fun than learning new employable skills at a business that provides you with knowledge and social connections to go far in life? The lively scene in your hometown. Who needs the bright, eye-damaging lights of a city like Boston or New York when you could have the luxuries provided by a nearby Target for shopping, your old high school to visit, and plenty of family gatherings with conversations vastly different from the intellectual university dialogue you're used to? And what internship have you ever heard of that offers students the ability to play online video games in their room so they can hear obscenities from disgruntled and underparented 12 year olds?
- They didn’t deserve you
That’s right, it’s perfectly okay to have some self-confidence and know that they made a mistake rejecting you. After all, you attend Brown University: the number one school in the Ivy League when ranked by alphabetical order. I’m willing to bet that this potential employer had no idea that their applicant was a profound enough intellectual to have created an entirely new delicacy in the Ratty last week (it was a mash up of everything on the dessert table stuffed tight into a plastic cup then covered in soft serve ice cream). Perhaps this employer saw your resume and just knew that you were too good for them, and they saw their rejection as a humble but proper pass on something they did not deserve.
- None of your friends have gotten any cool internships so why should you
Your friends wouldn’t get a sweet gig to make money over summer, because if they did they would be leaving you in the dust, specifically lazy dust that doesn’t have any hope of making it to a significant position in their field. This lie is a tricky one, as the easiest way to convince yourself it is true is to not ask your friends about their summer plans. If they ask you about yours, you must make sure to not reciprocate and ask them, even as a natural response. As a matter of fact, if anyone brings up summer or even says the word "job," it is most effective for you to find some excuse (i.e. phone call, running late for an exam, explosive diarrhea from Vdub burrito bowls) to make a quick escape out of earshot so your sensitive and fictitious reality will not be disturbed.Image via