a girl gone corporate

If you would have asked me the number one thing I didn't want to do as a career when I was around 10 or 11 years old, I would have said 'Work in an office' without missing a beat. As of today, I am officially 1 week into the corporate world doing exactly what my 10-year-old self would have balked in horror at.

Out of everything that I've experienced this year regarding growing up and getting wiser, this is probably the thing that I would have least expected. 

Back in January of this year my goals and ideas for how this year was going to pan out were drastically different than what I'm experiencing right now. I think a part of why this year turned out the way it did was due to the fact that I was stubbornly following a path that I thought I wanted, but deep down wasn't quite sure about. 

I really thought I wanted to be a teacher and work at a Japanese school teaching English. I considered moving to China and teaching English there for a year while living with my best friend. In my planner, I had written down 'Goals: Move to China' for the year of 2019. 

I thought teaching was something that I was destined to do. Since I was a little girl, I've loved playing teacher and giving my poor sister 'homework' printouts I had found online. I have a strong memory about one particular summer day in which I sat at the edge of my desk and bulletin board and passionately taught Gabby about the food pyramid. 

However, as I looked into the logistics of a career I've been set on for years, I realized that it wasn't something I wanted to do for the long term. And so there I sat as a new graduate with a degree in Japanese, a passion project, and Education, my supposed dream, lost on what to do and wondering how I got here. 

In July I started to take personality test after personality test, telling me I should be a nurse or a social worker or any other kind of communication-based job that would generally fit a 10 question survey. I had my degree but I had no sense of where I was going, and that's when I started to look inward and ask myself what it was I really wanted to do or was good at. 

I'm definitely not going to say that I found the answer, considering only one week into my 1st corporate job. I'm also not going to say that teaching is not for me, because I really loved it and if I could have continued where I was working, I would have. However, I came to the realization that many adults of my age group come to when entering the workforce: I've got loans to pay and I've got things to accomplish. 

About 2 months ago, I started applying for almost every LinkedIn job on the planet that I qualified for. I was applying for jobs in marketing, finance, accounting, office work, sales, customer service and anything else that would accept or even glance at a fresh out of college resume. 

I joined 7 different recruitment agencies and went on multiple interviews until I finally found someone willing to hire me. 

I will say that the job searching experience was more difficult than I expected. I had really thought that my 3 or 4 years of work experience in my undergrad, where I spent 25 hours a week toiling away for work experience, to actually mean something. In the grand scheme of things, it was almost as if my resume was blank, which really knocked me on my feet. 

The burdensome jobs that I had been working so hard on for the past 3 years or so didn't mean anything in the end.  What actually got me a position was being an organization leader for 2 years back when I was a sophomore, something that I had originally left off my resume, which inspired my current company to give me the job. 

I'm currently working as an executive assistant. Every day I walk into an office in New York City and I spend the entire day in that office. I have always been opposed to people in offices because I felt like they weren't actually accomplishing anything, but I realize now that that was me being naive. I believed that being on the front lines of the action was the only way you could actually contribute. 

Despite sitting in an office all day, my job gets a lot done. I'm still in the learning phase where it seems very overwhelming, but I can't say it's not fun and every day is different! There's a lot to get used to coming from being a teacher to working in the business setting. I really hope that this is the perfect fit I was looking for and that this can turn into something that I can be doing 5 or 10 years from now. 

I find myself acting more and more like an adult, which kind of scares me because I feel like I'm losing touch with the person that I used to be. These formative years of identity that I'm going through right now are going to be filled with moments like these, so I think the only thing I can do is prepare myself for more introspection and just keep pursuing things the way I'm doing right now.

This post comes off a bit more like a rant than an actual blog post but nonetheless thank you for reading and I'll see you next time. :)