This story starts in a far away land. A land inhabited by people just like you and I, but with an incredible amount of alcohol and bad decisions. This land is called: Delaware. The year is 2017 and I am currently a University of Delaware senior, living in my fraternity’s house, trying to figure out where I am going to go in life. Perhaps one of the most terrifying moments in a young person’s life isn’t when they are applying and waiting to hear back from colleges, but rather what happens once that college experience is over. Where do you go? What do you do? Suddenly your very structured life becomes fluid and almost loses any meaning or function.
What often happens is that this individual will move back to where they came from, with their parents whom they just left four years ago thinking they were never going to see each other again. As you move back to the room you inhabited during your transformative high school years, you get swallowed by the world of social media. Suddenly, every single person other than yourself seems to be living their lives to the fullest and you are the only one stuck at home with their parents. Panic kicks in. You finally get trapped into one of those Instagram schemes run by charismatic sales people who promise you that if you just follow a couple of their simple rules you will be a self-employed millionaire and live the life that you dream. Obviously, you find out that the only way these people make money is by convincing people like you to buy their course on how to make money, which is an incredible loop of nothingness.
Your resume goes flying off the shelves to Indeed.com to any and every entry level job available in the tri-state area. Real estate, sales, marketing, all jobs that have an average turn around rate of a couple of months and need new motivated (or desperate) workers at all times. You struggle applying because you have no experience and also the job description makes no sense. You have a history in sports so you apply to become a soccer coach and that takes off for a year or so. Traveling across the tri-state area coaching kids of all ages and temperaments, you build a thick skin and the ability to command people with no shame. Also, the crazy hours really teach you the value of work.
One day, you are conversing with a friend of yours who is an entrepreneur and has nothing to do all day, who makes you realize that your job (although valid) is not worth keeping at the expense of living life and its experiences. As winter comes around once more and you get ready to coach five year olds in the snow (even harder than on regular grass), you pack up your things and your savings and move to Mount Snow, Vermont with your entrepreneurial buddy where you work as a liftie for 40 days. The house is big thanks to your soccer coach savings, and the skiing is free. The snow shoveling is a little less pleasurable.
Eventually the money runs out and the temperature shows no sign of getting warmer. You move back to that same house with your parents where you spend the remainder of winter improving your resume and sending it out even harder than last time. Finally, something sticks. A real nine to five sales job calls you back for an interview. You take that confidence and leadership from coaching soccer and that work ethic from shoveling snow for eight hours and you drag it to Madison Square Park where you interview for a sales position with zero experience in sales. Two weeks later, while running yet another cone drill with the local five year olds you’ve been coaching, you get a call from the company: “Hello, can you start Monday?”
Finally, steady paychecks. Real money flows in every week. A strict commute and co-workers your own age. You are finally living the life that people who graduated with you have been already living for three years. You show greater resilience than everyone else at work because they have been stuck in a cubicle for three years while you’ve only been doing it for three months. You are fresh and motivated.
Your goal is six months, then maybe go back to school and start a real life long career. However at the sixth month goal, the routine has become addicting. The paychecks, friendships, and company culture are something that you are not ready to abandon so you extend your goal to one year. However, things go south at around the nine month target. A pandemic swoops into the world and you are quickly transferred back home, this time to Long Island, where you proceed to work without the company culture and everything that made you feel proud of being just another working American. Suddenly you understand the burnout that you saw in people when you first started at the company. School? School.
You are now 25 and people have careers. The most successful of your friends are in law school and medical school while your most avid college drinking buddies are pursuing the ladder in sales and marketing. You realized that your life must be one revolving academics and a true profession, without disregarding the fact that deep down, you are an entertainer. How do you combine those aspects? Communications and Media.
Here I am today, at Pace University studying from home looking forward to creating this next crazy chapter of my life.