What’s Big, Shiny and Read All Over?

It’s summer, and if you’re in a full-time MBA program, it means you’re off to your summer internship to try your hand at the job you really wanted all this time, but didn’t know you wanted until you started going to all the speed dating networking events and company presentations that you never had enough time to prepare for because you were too busy scraping by in your core curriculum courses only to forget what ‘heteroscedasticity’ was two days after your business statistics final.

Somehow— and I must hand it to our dedicated professors, career coaches, mentors, alumni and B-school career center — everyone I know got the type of internship that they wanted or suited them best. People come to business school wanting to gain a competitive advantage for the next move in their careers or to make a complete career change altogether, and somehow, the universe hears them and gives them the internship that’s right for them, to give them a taste of the field or position that they may eventually choose to go into full-time. Of course, a large part of that has to do with the uncompromising drive of the students who pursue the internships tenaciously.

For one person, it was a pairing of her love for basketball with her newly acquired business skills for a role as a PR associate for the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. For another friend, it was a mix of his past engineering background, lifelong enthusiasm for technology and newfound proclivity for strategic marketing that landed him a position at VMWare in California. And for another it was a personal connaissance of Tazo Teas and passion for Starbucks culture that propelled him to work for the coffee giant in Seattle.

For me, it turned out to be a marketing position with The Associated Press, through which I will help them build their social media platforms and strategies for their various businesses, particularly their AP Images business. What an opportunity to be able to pair what I’ve loved doing all this time (journalism) with what I’m learning now (marketing)!

I’ll be living in New York City, which, until two days ago had been so far from anything that’s familiar to me that all I COULD do was imagine it based on what I’d heard from friends, read in books, seen on the television shows or read in the news. It seemed to be this magical black hole that sucked people into its impenetrable pull such that they’d never be able to leave its abusive clutch over them: the city that provides just enough pleasure — by way of inspiring hopes and dreams — for all the pain its residents endure (crowded streets, small spaces, high standards of living and extreme temperatures in the winter and summer).

It might be too much. I’m a girl from a small university town who’s only recently gotten used to having to actually wait in traffic during rush hour. For me, Atlanta was a big city, and I thought that’s as big a city as I could handle. Yet here I am because the Big Apple has enticed me with an opportunity that combines two things that I love.

And from what I hear, one bite could leave me hooked.