Select Page

Coming to school my junior year, I was ecstatic and filled with excitement to begin the semester. Having had two years at Penn State under my belt, I truly felt like I knew the ropes of the school, what I wanted from my professors, and how my career would play out after graduation. I already had two high-caliber summer internships – for which I truly had to work hard to attain – but now as a junior, it was my time to have the ‘pick of the litter’ for job opportunities. I had developed this plan before even setting foot on campus in the fall. My master plan.

The plan I had created involved several steps that would lead me to career success. Beginning in junior year, I was focused to succeed in my first actuarial class and also build from my internships in retirement consulting and reinsurance (insurance for insurance companies) to attain the high profile consulting internship with Deloitte in human capital. With that experience on a resume, working in higher management roles would be much easier and assuming that the certification exams are being passed then there would be nothing stopping me from the highest rankings. However, when I was going through their interview process, I was rejected after the first round of interviews. Even applying to each of my back-up companies, I never made it to the final offer. I was also not succeeding in the course, and a few times my difficulties in the class made me question my ability to even continue in the major and the field overall. The fall semester of my junior year seemed like a very dark time for me overall. I struggled greatly in my first actuarial class, and I was still somehow having difficulties finding an internship. I was devastated and depressed.

It has been a whole year since that time for me, and now as a senior, I have had a lot of personal growth since then. To me during this time, I was solely focused on having my own plan success work, and I was not looking to the bigger picture of maybe how I needed to change as well. The fall semester of my junior was not a devastating time for me in retrospect, merely just a time where I needed to get out of my childish way of thinking. I felt seemingly overconfident in myself that I knew what I wanted out of life and I knew how to exactly get it, but that was not the case.

That semester, my classes were reasonably difficult, but it helped me to deeply ingrain myself into the concepts and understand how to apply it easily to the real world. I also had to continue to grow and recognize my own inefficiencies of managing my time, and it is something now that I am always working to improve. The result of not attaining any of the several internships that I was initially looking towards involved me studying abroad to Fiji over the summer and working a phenomenal internship with AIG in New York City. I would have never had the opportunity to study abroad given my other internships. Not to mention, the AIG internship gave me so much incredible experience and exposure that I easily accepted their full-time offer when it was provided. Lastly, I will also have opportunities to be engaged with a non-profit learning center once I move to New York. The opportunities in front of me now are truly much better than what I even thought that I was losing originally.

My career aspirations do not have to follow one cookie-cutter method to success, and my own plan had to fall to pieces for something to turn out better than I could have imagined.  It was necessary to recognize that getting what I want out of life is not always what I need at the moment, and no matter how bad a situation seems there is always going to be a better day. I am excited for the future of my career, and I know that however it progresses through the years it will be for the best.