A Start-up Summer
“Hope you’re getting excited to travel soon” “…getting in touch today regarding your internship placement” “…a start-up called GenZen” “…belief that bridging the generational gap has never been as important” “…would like to have an informal introductory video call”
My gaze darted from one end of my laptop screen to the other. This was it, the email I had been waiting on for months — the one that informed me where I would spend the majority of my sophomore summer interning. Quite frankly, pretty underwhelming. Phrases like “assist with their community events,” or “mix of experience and innovation” were, at the time, pretty meaningless to me. If you’ve been keeping up with the blog series at all, you will know by now that I love clear rules and expectations, and that I never really felt comfortable being grouped with the rest of Gen Z. An ambiguous, highly fluid start-up aimed at making me the spokesperson of my generation? Not my style.
The following day, after the aforementioned informal meeting, I was feeling a bit better. I was still (almost even more so) uncertain as to what my role would be, but at least the founder seemed kind, and genuinely invested in making this a positive experience. Laying down on my best friend’s couch in Minnesota, I decided to put it out of my head for the time being, as attempting to predict all of the possible contingencies wasn’t going to do me any good either way.
Two weeks later, I sat down in a coffee shop across from my supervisor and the other intern, Tara, the Texas Tech student whom I would be working with all summer. There we were, the GenZen company in its entirety — no more than one of us even knowing what that was. It remained that way for the first two weeks. When friends from home texted and called, eager to hear about my grand “study abroad experience,” I joked that I had worked jobs where objects were quite literally thrown at my head that required less cognitive energy than this one did. In truth, I really was exhausted. When asked now, I compare that fatigue to what I imagine conversing in a foreign language for 8 hours a day would feel like. I wouldn’t know, as I’m hopelessly monolingual, but perpetually trying to psychoanalyze “the truth” out of my boss’ words is the closest I have ever come to that. He told us he was still figuring out what he wanted the company to be, and that we were the ones he wanted to help shape that for him. At least for Tara, this fairly clearly meant utilizing her expertise in social media marketing to redesign all of our online platforms, for me, this meant, well, anything I wanted it to. I could tell that this freedom was meant to be empowering, but every day I went home feeling confused and incompetent. Why couldn’t I just figure out what he really wanted from me?
The answer: exactly what he said he did. There was no secret messaging hidden in his words, he wasn’t challenging me to psychoanalyze his expectations for me out of his words, he really just wanted us to care, and to be creative. I don’t exactly know or remember what triggered this realization for me, realistically, it probably was not a cinematic “aha!” moment at all, and rather a collection of inklings slowly rearranging the schema I had created of him and this experience. When I fully embraced it, though, my life became exponentially better.
Potentially not-so-coincidentally, this is also when I got my first designated assignment. It’s not that I was “doing nothing” before – far from it, I was doing a bit of everything, but nothing that really felt like it was me who needed to be doing it. That is, until I started working on creating my first workshop. Within days I was reading articles and studies, compiling and organizing information and ideas, thinking of inventive ways to integrate audience participation with the presentation materials. Finally, I had a task – and it was one I enjoyed. I’d also like to think that it was one I was good at. I was able to incorporate my research, organizational, and design skills all into this project. This was when I truly began to recognize how valuable this experience would become.
There are few opportunities in life wherein you will get to experiment with many things at once. Unfortunately, our time is incredibly finite, especially considering the way in which young students are expected to pigeonhole themselves into one specific field as early as possible these days. As somebody who has spent years ravaged by career uncertainty and anxiety, I have felt as though I could not possibly have enough time to explore all of the things I wanted to. And yet here I was, that opportunity handed to me on a golden platter. To his credit, my supervisor had been telling me this all along, but sometimes we need to come to these things ourselves. And come to it I did – I have worked on a broader range of projects over the last 5-6 weeks than I do in a full semester of courses. This is really saying something, considering that I have three majors and none of them have any course overlaps.
After finishing the first workshops (iterations of the same fundamental materials), I felt capable and engaged – not entirely sure that I was going to perform my next task phenomenally, but certainly ready to try. Enter the article series. Initially, my supervisor’s idea for this was something more akin to a media reaction or commentary series, where I would find recent publications or posts and add a “Gen Z interpretation of them.” This version lasted about half a day. Creating lengthy tertiary responses to things that were already written as opinion pieces felt like everything that made me choose not to pursue a PhD in Philosophy, or (more comparable to my skill level) reminiscent of those Youtube videos “reacting” to reaction videos. Nobody cares. At this point, thankfully, I knew enough to feel comfortable voicing this sentiment to my boss as soon as I could articulate it. As a compromise, I thought of two distinct “article series," if you will. As they exist today, the Abstract to Action series is housed on our Instagram and Linkedin, where I translate convoluted academic research into palatable, social media tailored posts. The blog series, obviously, is on the website, and contains highly personalized, longform reflections from, as of now, just me! Soon enough, though, others from different generations will add their own reflections to the mix.
By the time this final article is posted, I will be long gone – by two weeks, anyway. Here are some things I have learned:
I absolutely hate working with digital platforms, blanket statement, no exceptions.
It’s okay to try something for the first time and not be good at it – it's still worth trying. I know most people know this, but for those of us who don’t, I think we really can't be reminded enough.
I love reading new research, and I enjoy communicating it in ways that are (hopefully) understandable
I much prefer morning meetings to be over coffee, and I am more than willing to work late if it means a longer lunch.
Always overcommunicate. If you think you are communicating enough, communicate a little bit more.
The best things I have created (I’ll speak for Tara as well) have required both creativity and attention to detail, a willingness to be uptight about execution.
Writing in a blog-style format is fun! It’s been ages since I’ve been granted the space to do something like this.
I probably wouldn’t choose to work at a start-up again. I’m glad I did it once, I learned a lot about myself and about how I function, it just so happens that how I function best is in a bit more structured an environment than a start-up can afford to be.
There is little doubt in my mind that by the time the next interns roll in, GenZen will look almost nothing like it did when Tara and I were there. Already so much has changed in these past eight weeks. Chief among them, my attitude towards GenZen and myself. I won’t pretend this internship made me suddenly overcome my fear of vague instructions and open-ended assignments. But it did teach me how to move through that unease without shutting down, and to recognize that this discomfort can often be what moves you forward the most. Whether or not this was the “perfect” fit doesn’t matter as much to me anymore. I’m proud of the work I contributed to GenZen, and of what it is shaping up to be. It was certainly a challenging, confusing, and uncomfortable experience, but it was also an exciting, influential, and emboldening one. Most importantly, it was mine, and I’m glad it was.
About the author:
If you were wondering who wrote our blog today, her name is Alexandra! She has been working as a summer intern since June. She has one more month left in Ireland and is excited to enter her junior year studying Philosophy, Psychology, and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A fun fact about her is that she loves Diet Coke & iced coffee, especially when consumed on audiobook-supported long walks. Click on our Instagram posts below to see more of her work!
