Next Week

I encountered a strange, but all-too familiar feeling.

I’ll back-track: as an aspiring Computer Science student, I have been going a little crazy the past two months — applying to summer internships, practicing array questions in Java, doing LinkedIn lurking, visiting virtual career fairs, and hoping that my resume will stand the test of company resume parsers. Whenever I visit “supportive” online college recruiting communities, it is full of encouraging words, but also posts by grizzled veterans of the recruiting process, casually mentioning their Leetcode grinds or sharing woes about navigating multiple job offers. In other words, it seemed virtually impossible to snag one of those fancy, Silicon Valley Software Engineering internships.

So imagine how I felt, when an online assessment, and a few calls later, I was extended an offer (it is currently October 28) for a $20 billion ~Silicon Valley~ company. The recruiter called me to give me the good news — and I barely even heard her talk about the signing offer. A disbelieving happiness was rushing through me, and I felt excited, then thrilled, then accepting, then a bit of guilt, and then… stress.

My sister recently said that I take in stress like a baby’s morning milk, and I might have to agree. I’ll first discuss the guilt —I have been practicing questions on Hackerrank and the like, but nothing to the religious extent that people espouse as the bare minimum to scrape by a first screening. Heck, I haven’t even made it past trees in my ad-hoc learning of what data structures are. I didn’t even have to do a whiteboard interview. I began to think: was this too easy? Did I snag this without trying as hard as other people?

After this guilt began to cling to my skin, the stress set in. Oh no, I wanted to see how all these other applications would turn out. I was planning to try interning internationally. What if I can’t do that now? And I do admit that I don’t know *that* much about JavaScript debugging when I had to describe it. What if I show up on the job and am entirely incompetent? They mentioned pair programming with my mentor — what if I can’t even come up with simple syntax in React? What if I can’t even set up my local machine?? What if I actually hate software engineering and waste a summer of valuable experience where I could be doing design, writing, research, social impact work? What if I just struck gold with this internship, decide to move on and try new opportunities next summer, and can’t get an internship junior year???

And so on, and so forth.

I might sound insane and/or entirely relatable. But I simply couldn’t relish my feeling of achievement beyond an hour, without fearing how impermanent it would be, what other hurdles I’d encounter. It was the same since high school — when I placed nationally in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, when I got into Harvard. Did I actually try, enough to merit what I am receiving? Am I fooling everyone into thinking that I am skilled, successful, and passionate? Do they see all the actually talented, determined people around me? What if I fail next time and shatter the mirage? Have I just created a hollow shell of a persona with just a flimsy, flashy LinkedIn skin?

I have been pondering on time, and so this incident ties back to what I call “Next Week.” I snagged an internship offer this week, but I better start prepping so I don’t embarrass myself, “next week.” I’d love to catch up with you, but I’m busy now — we can chat sometime, “next week.” There’s so much to do — all these commitments that I’m not even sure I enjoy, that I chose for myself — that I don’t have time to read, explore passion projects, or live with my own thoughts — so  I’ll just start doing what I actually like to do: “next week.”

In other words, “Next Week” is the twisted reality that I, and maybe some of you, spend so much of the present in consternation about, and trying to push off the present to plan the future. Always trying to pull the puppet strings of what comes next. And this is often necessary — to progress towards long-term goals, to layout plans and engagements. But when I can’t take a nap without stressing about what I need to do after I wake up, when I worry about failing immediately after earning an offer — where do I go? I’m sprinting forward without appreciating the cheers that fill the air around me, without even feeling the pavement under my toes. 

This is an ongoing tussle. A battle against imposter syndrome, a pesky little thing. A challenge to accept myself as I am, instead of focusing on what I “need” to be. A dare to myself, to realize that while I take comfort in the structure of known pathways, veering off-course to sit in the wildflowers, soak in some sun and drizzle, & walk myself off the highway, would be risky, unconventional, and laborious — but altogether, more fulfilling.