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An ENTITY Magazine woman shares how ENTITY has challenged her.

I knew from the start that the Entity internship would be challenging – I would be living in a huge city all on my own, working 40 hours a week, barely getting paid, and I wasn’t even sure if the journalism career path was what I wanted. But I did know that not taking such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity would be deeply regretted. And I know I made the right choice, because the challenges Entity has brought me have made me grow so much.

1 Having a structured life is productive

Working 9-5 every day is a scary thing. This was my first experience of having a really rigid work schedule and it was honestly hard at first. I had to seriously adjust to giving up my time, especially it being summer, which as a kid always meant complete freedom from schedules.

Now that it’s been awhile I can appreciate the productivity that comes with waking up early with a schedule and set of tasks that need to be done. I also know how to make use of my free time much better. In the beginning of the internship I would come home exhausted and waste the rest of my day on the internet, refusing to use my brain any longer. This led to me feeling like my entire life was work and that I had no time for anything else.

But, as my mother smartly put it, you only work a third of your life. If you work 8 hours a day and you sleep 8 hours at night then you should have 8 hours of free time. Once I started seeing the structure in this way, it made it much easier to accept and I started making use of my free time in more productive ways.

2 Work isn’t just about money

 I’ve had a lot of jobs in the past 6 years and all of them were only for that minimum wage paycheck. The internship obviously doesn’t pay like a normal job or even like a minimum wage job, and that made me start realizing what exactly work is about. Work is about sticking to your word, completing something you said you would, and giving back to the world what you’ve been taking. When work is only about money, it’s not enough, because there’s usually never enough money worth the amount of work you actually put in. When work is about something bigger than money, when you are doing work to better yourself, to learn, to give back, then the paycheck is a bonus on top.

3 No job is fun all the time

After working in this great office, in this great city, with such a great group of women, I’ve realized that any job, even if it sounds perfect, will still be work. I’ve had the opportunity to talk about this with people outside of the internship too and when I brought up this realization they ensured me that they too are not always happy with their job, they aren’t always excited to go into work, and that this was just reality. When I expressed this to my dad he replied well they don’t call it work for nothing! This is an important thing to keep in mind, especially for the generation that’s been told their whole life to find a job they love. Find a job you love, yes, but if it starts getting hard, that doesn’t mean it’s not the right job for you – it just means it’s a job.

These lessons have grown me in immeasurable ways. I can now see myself being successful in a real job – something that seemed impossible at the beginning of this internship. I’m so grateful that I was given this opportunity and so glad that I jumped on it because this has been the most impactful summer I have ever had.

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