Admittedly, this is an instance of rage writing.

It will come as a shock to no one under the age of 25 that the world of applications — whether they be to internships, jobs, fellowships or other similar opportunities — is among the most soul-sucking, grueling and all-around depressing realms of a young person’s experience. These opportunities are incredibly competitive. Not only can one expect to face competition in the hundreds or even thousands of other applicants, but among those one can expect to be competing against, are those individuals who have a so-called “story.”

These individuals tell a particular tale. They have faced adversity like no other. They speak of great adventures which have broadened their perspective. They impart their greatest lofty aspirations. And these features of their candidacies have led them, in a neat and methodical way, to this application. With their best foot forward, head held up high, they apply … and proceed to secure the positions we “normal” individuals, who’ve not been blessed with a seamless pathway toward our own professional aspirations, wish so badly to secure for ourselves. 

From my experiences in the aforementioned hellhole that is the world of applications, I have become increasingly aware of a certain contradiction. A great deal many of the opportunities we apply for expect us to have had the same or analogous experience that they are designed to provide. The expectation is that you lead a life that makes this opportunity the organic “next step” through logical deduction. It’s a backward approach to examining one’s candidacy. To lay it out plainly, instead of providing the opportunity as a pathway that leads an individual into something new, the person reviewing applications expects the individual to already have had the experience that opportunity is meant to provide. That is what makes them qualified for it: not their merit, training or what their letters of recommendation attest to their capabilities. 

What is wrong with this picture? Well, to start with, a non-negligible share of us have absolutely no idea what we want to do with our lives. The entire point of these opportunities is to aid us in understanding what we want to do for the foreseeable future — which will apparently never end in retirement because … well, have you seen the state of the economy we’re stepping into? I digress, but the point still stands: these opportunities expect that we know what it is that we want to do with our lives and have known that for all our lives such that our experiences reflect this desire. This is an absurd expectation.  

It is unrealistic that we, mere undergraduates who’ve been alive on planet Earth for less than a quarter century — and conscious for even less time than that — are expected to have found our unwavering professional drive. I’ve just barely settled on what my favorite cuisine is (in a true acting out of the Hegelian dialectic by the way, I’ve ended up exactly where I started — at the food of the Mediterranean — having tasted much more in the interim). How can one reasonably expect that I come out of my mother’s womb with a pen and legal pad in hand, clutching Sein und Zeit and declaring, “I SHALL BE AN HISTORIAN OF THE CONTINENTAL POLITICAL TRADITION” (in German, of course)? 

It’s not reasonable — it’s wholly nonsensical. Yet, that seems to be the expectation. The expectation is that you emerge into the world perfectly well-connected, with a certain professional goal, and that your Curriculum Vitae reflects the methodical steps you’ve taken to actualize that goal. Such that, this opportunity, to which you are now applying, appears as the natural next step in your professional trajectory.  

I hope you all find it in your hearts to pardon my shattering of delusions. Life is not The Game of Life. You do not either go to college or not, graduate or not, get married or not, have kids or not — et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam. Life is not that neat — for better and for worse. Many of us only come to recognize what it is that we want from life after a series of “missteps” or a myriad of other ways not dissimilar from this one. Very few of us have a perfectly laid-out plan of life that we embark on from birth. If we do, it is more often than not either a product of the sheer luck of having been exposed to one’s professional aspiration very early (and that aspiration having remained over the course of one’s maturation). Or, alternatively, the result of immense privilege — a product of having grown up in a family that is well connected and has the resources to ensure that their student comes of age in a contained manner that organically cultivates their professional trajectory. 

The expectation that is now placed on students, that we have a Platonic image of our life in our heads that guides our every professional action is misplaced. It belongs in The Game of Life but not in real, actual life itself. Life itself, with all its twists and turns, makes us rethink what it is that we want out of it and why. That is precisely the way it should be. Yet the way these opportunities evaluate our candidacies is by frowning upon these exact methods of coming to realize what excites you about the world. 

These opportunities reward those applicants whose “life story” has already put them on the path towards actualizing it and they punish those who take the very ordinary — albeit nonlinear — route of still charting that path. 

We are told by our culture that we should use our time in college to figure ourselves out, but this is merely lip service to an outdated time in which this ideal was recognized as valid by the professional setting one graduated into after college. This setting no longer accepts that ideal. Instead, it expects that this ideal has been actualized through every step taken in one’s time in college. It’s a ridiculous and utterly detached value system that rewards the calculated, though drearily mundane life of those who were in the position to have always known what it is that they wished to accomplish. 

I’m tired of pretending to have always known what I have wanted to do. It’s exhausting to fabricate this lie over and over again when I know full well that what I think I want to do now is something I couldn’t have imagined three years ago — let alone earlier. I’ve used college to come to this understanding; I’ve done exactly what we’re told to do with our time in college. And now, as I’m preparing to leave it, I’m being punished for it. I hate to cast myself in this light, as a victim of circumstance, but, in truth, I’ve yet to figure out how to spin this story in any other way — at least not in a way that empowers me as a creator of circumstance. Perhaps that story will become clear at a later time, a time in which I will have actualized what I wish to do. 

Until then, I’m left wondering: Whatever happened to just being a normal person who wants to do and try extraordinary things?