Recently, on a car ride home, I had a moment of reflection. “What am I doing with my life?” While 2020 has taken a big turn for all of us, It has been an eye opening year for me. This has been my first year where all of my goals haven’t been achieved yet. I spent my December 31st 2019, writing down goals for each month, as well as bigger goals for the year, on a personal level and scholarly level. To be frank, my personal level encapsulates all of my other goals, as my school life isn’t all that I am. One of the goals that I had for this year was to intern at HBO. no specific department, I just wanted to have those three letters, or, Warner Cable on my Linkedin Resume. I worked really hard and got all the way to the video interview.

And then I didn’t get a callback. I thought, maybe, they cancelled the internship program because of Covid. Well, I saw people getting accepted. I had to understand that even though I’ve been working towards this goal for about 6 months, some goals aren’t meant to be achievable. The goals that we set in life are supposed to range in difficulty and possibility. I learned this a couple years back when I had the wildest goals that i could’ve thought of, but surpassed them in no time.

Goals are really the stepping stool for our advancement. While I’ve had many goals for this year, I’ve reached the point where I’d just let things happen- especially with fires in California and everything else that’s happening in the world. Our future is nowhere close to being promised.

The end goal of my experiences with internships is that, while a company may have a big name, you are working with people. People who make mistakes, people who sometimes are still learning and don’t know what they’re doing, and people who can’t separate the professional and the personal. While my dreams on HBO were crushed, I think everything else that happened in it’s way made me go back and rethink some of my goals. That working for HBO doesn’t mean that I’m just working for a big company. I’d have a boss I probably wouldn’t like, being a Black woman may not work in my favor, and that “I’m still very young” (which has stopped no-one , like ever, just saying)

While I didn’t achieve my goal of sitting in a Game of Throne office chair in Hudson Yards, I’ve remodeled many other goals that I’ve been able to accomplish. Finding a more suitable internship that would land me a part-time job in my field. Tiny things such as relax more, take life by the neck and rest it on a pillow and be grateful for the little things. While I’ve been able to be on Snapchat this month, which has never essentially been a goal for me, I’ve been able to get there.

It’s time to go back to the drawing board and prioritize my goals as they come. One of my biggest goals is coming to fruition (can’t say until it’s final, hopefully before the end of this semester I can share) and I’ve been taking it for granted by focusing on other things, and I’m really happy that I’m able to do more research, reading anything I can get my hands on, talking to people about their life stories and digging deep to understand myself more. Goal planning is becoming a bit easier as I fully grasp the idea that goals are goals and some might score, and some might miss.