the power of decision-making
So I’m here. I’m finally here. Singapore, Singapore (yes, it’s a city and a country). May 23rd, 2019.
It’s taken hundreds of emails, 2 visa applications, 3 internship offers, plenty of mentorship, 24 hours of travel, 3 carry on bags, and lots of sweat to get here, but I’m here.
While all of that went into it, all it really took to be here was one decision.
Just four short weeks ago, I was finishing my last few exams at Queen’s University, rounding out my third year as an Applied Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering student. While the end of the semester should have come with a rush of relief, I could barely finish an exhale after my last exam before I found out that the internship I’d accepted for the upcoming summer in Singapore nearly three months earlier (and for which my visa FINALLY got approved!) had fallen through and I no longer had a job for the summer.
If I was in a baseball game, it was the bottom of the ninth, and I was up to bat. I was expecting to hit a home-run on my first pitch. As this internship fell through my hands, it felt like the ball had just whizzed by me, and in the blink of an eye, I had one strike.
Strike one.
The news of my internship falling through came as a slightly harsher blow when the requirement for my summer, as per the Cansbridge Fellowship rules, was finding a 12 week internship in ASIA. For someone who can’t use chopsticks to save her life and has only been outside of North America a couple of times, this wasn’t exactly the ideal summer-job-search-scenario.
Beyond that, I was planning to head right to Asia after the Cansbridge Fellowship Conference/Bootcamp (a one week deep dive into the tech start-up landscape of Silicon Valley) which was just one week away. I now had to find a new internship in a potentially new location, book a flight, find a place to live, reassure my parents I wouldn’t be kidnapped on the other side of the world and get all of this done in a matter of 2 weeks, at most.
Beyond that, I was burnt out before I even got this news after a dense academic year of balancing a full course load and a full-time job. The last thing I wanted to be doing was working at max capacity to land a job which previously took me months to sort out in just 14 days.
Ultimately though, I knew feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to do much to get me closer to my summer in Asia, so eventually I shelved my frustration and got to work on the job search.
Like any well-coached student looking for an internship, I did what we’re aways told to do to expedite the job search process: reach out to your network. And boy, did my network reach back. It was amazing. Upon learning I’d lost my first internship (may it rest in peace), I immediately sent out a couple dozen emails to anyone I thought might know of a possible opportunity for me in Asia. Within two days, nearly everyone had responded to me with questions, suggestions and connections all tied to what I could do in Asia this summer.
While I should have felt encouraged, excited and eager to respond to everyone, I just felt overwhelmed and confused. I honestly didn’t have answers to a lot of the questions, and while everyone around me seemed to have such a clear, distinct sense of direction as to where they wanted their career to go, I’d never felt more lost.
What kind of company do you want to work for?
How big do you want the company to be?
What industry are you looking for?
What technical skills do you have?
What are your marks like?
What type of role do you want?
Which cities do you want to work in?
It felt like every question I was being asked was inexplicably important. Like all of my answers were my answers for life, and what I decided for this summer would decide what I would do after I graduated and since that was my first job in the real world… that would basically dictate my whole life, right? (classic Type A third-year-university-student logic, I know).
As soon as I’d start to type an answer to a question, I’d second guess if it was what I really wanted or just what I felt like I should want, which caused me to procrastinate my response more. This obviously compounded the stress I was feeling because I had become my own biggest obstacle to establishing what I would do this summer, and the time was ticking.
After sensing that this feeling of overwhelm, lack of clarity and confusion was happening for a reason, I decided to revisit one of my very first internship options for the summer — a role at the Good Food Institute, a not-for-profit organization focused on bringing plant-based and cell-based meat alternatives to the global market, working towards a more sustainable future for food. For anyone who’s ever met me, you probably know this sounds like a near-perfect role for me, precisely at the intersection of the main areas I’m interested in; sustainability, food, plant-based eating and cooking, and social impact. It was a winning combination, and I felt silly that I hadn’t thought of doing it right away when my other internship fell through.
After some careful thought, I decided that this is what I wanted to do with my summer and everyone whom I’d spoken to agreed that it sounded like a wonderful opportunity.
I decided to accept the offer while I was in San Francisco at the Cansbridge Fellowship Conference, and it felt like a done deal. I started looking for places to stay on Airbnb and reaching out to people in my network about what I should know about where I was staying.
There’s one thing I haven’t mentioned to this point, something which seemed like a non-issue to me and most others who I’d spoken to about it: the location. My internship was set to be in Mumbai, India. And while I’d heard that solo female travellers should take some extra precautions in India, I really wasn’t too worried about my safety there. I’d be in a safe area, I’d make friends, my employers would look out for me, I’d be just fine.
Unfortunately, my parents did not seem to share this same light-hearted “all will work out!” belief about me travelling alone to India. After announcing my decision to my family, I received a tidal wave of texts, calls, and voicemails from my family telling me that going to India was the most irrational and unsafe thing I could possibly do, would make them very worried, and basically… was not going to happen.
If you’ve ever met my Dad, or any Moroccan-Jewish parent for that matter, you know this was a battle I just was not going to win. Plus, I knew that if anything did happen, I would feel terribly guilty. So, even though I didn’t fully agree with their reasoning as to why I couldn’t go, I decided to concede on my decision and dive back in to the internship search.
Strike two.
Great. Now, it was already mid-May and I had nothing. I was supposed to start my first internship on May 9th, several days earlier. I was starting to get nervous. Almost all the other fellows had jetted off to Asia after the conference and were all beginning their journeys into what would undoubtedly be an unforgettable summer of new, unique experiences for each of them in Asia.
It was hard feeling like I’d just been punched in the gut again with another internship opportunity slipping through my fingers; another perfect pitch whizzing by me where I just couldn’t manage to get my swing right.
I just wanted direction. A decision, a place to go, a job to look forward to, and most of all, I wanted a to get off of this unstable ground of uncertainty.
I decided I would give the internship search one more try, and if I didn’t find anything within a week, I would defer my internship to next summer and take the year to land an opportunity I’d be happy with. I wanted to be more careful and selective with the opportunities I would pursue, and really only go for things I was strongly considering doing. Essentially, I had one strike left before the game was over and I wanted to make sure I was being very selective about the pitch I was going to swing at.
I remembered an email landing in my inbox a few days earlier before I’d called off the internship search for my would-be-India-internship about a superfoods startup in Singapore.
Something about it pulled me in, and when I was diving back into my internship search, something told me to follow up on it. So I did. Through a very kind and generous individual, I was connected with one of the co-founders and after a couple of calls with the team, I decided to accept the offer they extended me to intern with them in Singapore this summer.
Something just felt right about the whole interaction. No red flags. No major concerns. Safe location (cheers, Dad). Industry I was interested in. Great team.
At this point in my journey, I realized a very important lesson: sometimes you just don’t have all the information you need to make a perfect decision. And sometimes, there’s very little you can do to access the information you would need to get closer to that perfect decision. And in those times, all you can do is make the best decision you can with the information that you have. It might be in exactly the right direction, it might be neutral, and it might take you in a direction you don’t want to go in. But in a time like that, the only way to get more information about what your best next decision would be, is to make the best decision you can within the choice you are facing right now.
Boom — we had a hit!
So, I finally hit the ball — no strike out, big relief. Is it a home-run? Honestly, I have no idea. It’s only my first day in Singapore as I write this. I’m sitting in a coffee shop (an oasis of familiarity amongst a brand new environment), writing on my laptop — just like I do at home. I haven’t started my internship yet. I’ve barely seen the city yet. 99% of my experience still lies ahead of me — and I’m excited for all of it. The ball is still flying through the air, and all I can do is run to first base. Whether it’s a single, double, triple or sends me all the way home will be decided by many things; and right now, I don’t have enough information to know which it will be. All I know is that I’m so grateful to be here. In this beautiful city, with an internship I’m excited for, a fresh mind and a burning enthusiasm to get to work.
Sometimes, when faced with a confusing, overwhelming and uncertain situation, the best thing we can do is make the decision to move forward in one direction. Whether it’s exactly the right direction or a few degrees off, you can always course correct later. What you can’t do is accomplish anything new from staying in the same place.