Fake It Till You Make It
It was my first week on Babson’s campus, I saw a poster on the wall of Park Manor West. It read “Meeting at 6:30pm for anyone interested in a career in finance.” Truth be told I had no idea what a career in finance even looked like. I knew finance was a popular concentration, thus I decided to attend the meeting. During the meeting, they discussed jobs in Investment Banking. A field I was not at all familiar with, they could have been saying gibberish and I likely would have understood just as much
Fast forward to today, July 19th, and I am a month into my internship at a private equity firm with a depth of knowledge that can equip me to help incoming freshmen learn about what a career in finance looks like. Looking back, I do not remember learning whole chunks of information about Investment Banking and Private Equity. Rather, it was a daily process of learning something new every day. Taking the risk by choosing to attend that first meeting set me up to learn a wealth of knowledge about various careers in finance. I can count one too many networking calls and interviews I was pretending that I knew a lot more than I truly did. However, I kept learning every day from peers, mentors, teachers, and co-workers at my internship. There is a reason the saying “fake it till you make it” is so popular. Sometimes, if you surround yourself around the right people and in the correct environment good things will happen. No matter what you are doing that has not gone your way yet, keep surrounding yourself with the right people and environment and good things will happen.
Lastly, if you are currently doing an internship or just reading about something new. Write down one thing you learn each day. This way over time you will be able to look back and truly see how much growth you have had from the start. Otherwise, you will just wake up one day and forget how important the daily grind of making the effort to learn was. Being able to see your growth will motivate you to keep working on your craft.