I don’t really need to be on Stone Street tonight, but I take a detour on my way to my real destination through the cobblestone paved path so that I can see who tonight’s guests are. Sometimes, the outdoor tables are full of girls just like me and my friends, laughing over salt-and-sugar-rimmed margs or spritzes of many kinds, shoulders exposed and phones in hand as they recall the tales of the week (accompanied by the occasional showing of a photo of a character in mention, for context purposes, of course). I take great joy from witnessing all of this familiar togetherness. Luckily, tonight is one of those nights.

One giggling girl nervously waves me over to ask where I bought my skirt from. I enthusiastically proceed to tell her where my skirt and my shirt and my shoes and my jewelry and my bag are from. I Instagram message her the links to my entire outfit right then and there. I consider this a form of reverence between women my age.

Other times, clean-cut men and women who wandered across the way from Wall Street with colleagues-turned-buddies glued their eyes to the athletic event broadcast to the outdoor television screens and down a Guinness, blazers cheekily peeking out of their work bags. My law school classmate spotted me here just a few weeks ago with his fellow interns. I didn’t realize how much I had changed since early May until we began conversing, and I witnessed a look of pleasant confusion on his face when I shared how free and at ease I felt, even in the busiest summer of my life. He told me that he’s seen me walking around the area a few times before but didn’t want to interrupt. I reassured him there’s no such thing as interrupting when I’m on my walks. I thought to myself, if anything, that’s kind of the whole point of them.

I turn down Water Street and watch cabs rush down the wide avenue, each driver’s head on a swivel as they hunt for their next fare. Each early evening, I pass by a combination of four to six at the sole outdoor table of The Dead Rabbit. As I move past the small throughway, I become keenly aware that to the families, friends, and double daters at hand, I am just a passerby. I put the “people” in their people watching, just as they do in mine. Equally intimate is the experience I have thirty seconds later at the intersection at the corner, where I watch a woman a few years older than I push a stroller past me, with her newborn strapped on her chest. I smile at her, and she smiles back. “So cute, congratulations!” She thanks me, stops, and turns so I can see the little hat her baby is wearing. I ooh and aah and tell her that her gorgeous baby is her mom’s twin. We know things about each other, even if we don't know each other.

I continue my trek and make my way through the Battery. I pause, get soft serve (vanilla and chocolate twist with rainbow sprinkles), and chat about the World Cup games with the man in the ice cream truck. He would root for Argentina, but he loves the spirit of the underdog in Spain. A block ahead, I offer to take a picture for the obvious family of tourists attempting to fit everyone into a selfie, and I give them three angles to choose from. I hand the mother’s phone back and avert my eyes as I wind past a couple tearfully arguing on a park bench. The man’s head is resting in his hands, while the woman crosses her left leg over her right away from him. Only a few benches over, the park’s resident caricature artist is cracking jokes with a bashful teenage sister-and-brother pair sitting for their portrait, while an elderly man, two books in hand, slowly takes his seat under one of the taller trees in the large green.

Occasionally, I’ll drift across the way to the fountain where children frolic under the rainbow projections from the spray in the round. Today, they come up to me and splash me with the drops that linger on their hands and forearms, their parents smiling from the side once they can tell that I relish the playfulness. I think about how big my baby brothers are now. I think about how big I am now. Then I start thinking about my parents. It always goes a little something like this.

My real destination is a single bench at the very tip of the Battery, facing Lady Liberty where the ferries pull in and out of the vast harbor. I sit cross-legged and close my eyes. I lift my arms to twist my hair into an updo to avoid my curls from being windswept into tangles. Two small and curious brown birds pick at fruit on the ground near my feet before returning to their perch on the barricade at the dock. I am glad that they know of this spot, too.

By the time my walk reaches the water, I have practiced letting my guard down a hundred tiny times for strangers who in return have let down their guard for me. If I’m lucky, there are repeat appearances from time to time of the people I see, and then they don’t feel much like strangers anymore. Their exposure and mine is no failure of discretion. Rather, I see it as a function of love. I used to feel that appearing as an impenetrable fortress emotionally to the world was how to be a serious person who gets serious opportunities professionally and relationally and the like. While every great fortress in history indeed defends its territory diligently, it also forecloses on it. Nothing gets in, which means nothing new can happen inside it.

True magnetism, as I have now learned over the course of my summer strolls, requires the opposite design. It defends nothing. It remains open and willing and generous with its attention for the right things to find their way toward it. It requires reachability, which is not a temperament. It is a decision you make about whether to let others connect with the access points in your mind and sometimes, if both they and you are lucky, your heart. Every seemingly inconsequential conversation I have with a stranger is really two people choosing, independently and at the same time, to be present in a world that rarely asks that of anyone who does not have a pre-existing obligation to each other.

A coworker of mine this summer spent a subway ride we took together to a work event divulging the details of a rather painful and drawn-out breakup process. I recounted to him my favorite poet Rumi’s words, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” I believe this without qualification. A person who lets herself be visibly moved by the world, who admits she can be shaken and unsettled and occasionally broken by it, is not exposing a weakness. She is opening the very aperture through which real connection gets in. The most powerful way of admitting this is not through her words, but through the way she chooses to navigate through the world. Walking has taught me that vulnerability is not measured by the size of what moves you, but by your willingness to let something move you at all and interrupt your immediate point of focus. Significance was never a property of the moment itself, but instead is something a person grants on purpose, and granting it is itself an admission that you can still be reached by very little, even in a very grandiose world. This is the true “stuff” of life.

New York City hands you a hundred small chances a night to practice this if you are willing to walk far enough to find them, and courageous enough to endure the initial discomfort of doing so by yourself. In time, the beautiful parts of this ritual reveal themselves. Most twenty-somethings spend the entire decade waiting for the big, obvious doors without noticing the dozen smaller ones. Many of these will only open for a person who looks as if she might actually answer if someone knocked. This goes for friendships, love, and work. With these walks, I am rehearsing the same openness I hope to eventually offer the moments that matter far more, in a material sense.

In due time and after I have worked through the edges of my playlist twice, I come back to my apartment. Three flights up, turn the key, and push. The lights are off, and the air is cool. The sun stands on its last legs against my tall window panes that reach almost from my floor to my ceiling. I do not turn the lights on right away. I wash my makeup off and find my place on the couch until whatever small sliver of the day that is left fades. I have spent an entire summer being found. Yet, some moments will remain only mine.

Perhaps I am uniquely sentimental, but thoughtful acts like those have always moved me the most. A “this made me think of you” text can transform my mood for the day, and a gift that was purchased deliberately and attentively will become my prized possession instantaneously. It’s my belief that to be considered is one of life’s greatest pleasures, not only because of how much joy it brings me to feel truly considered, but also because of how much joy it brings me to see how the people I love light up when they see that I consider them, too. 

Deciding early that your default orientation toward other people is one of generosity rather than calculation changes the texture of your whole life. In effect, it redirects your mental energy to focusing on the holistic impact of your own actions rather than the expectations you have of how others should behave toward you, which are unreliable. Satisfaction and fulfillment, then, become completely process driven experiences in your relationships with others.

Just as this has been true in my personal life, it has been true in my professional world, too. My feelings of fulfillment in my early career are only ever as strong as the belief I have in that moment in the philosophy of generosity.

If you don’t believe my anecdotal experience, you can investigate the body of research that has been making this case for years. Studies out of the University of British Columbia found that spending money on other people produced measurably higher levels of happiness than spending the same amount on oneself, and that this held across income levels, across cultures, across age groups. The size of the gift was largely irrelevant. The act itself was what moved the needle. Separate research from Lara Aknin and her colleagues found that the emotional reward of giving was not just a pleasant side effect but something closer to a biological feedback loop, one that actually motivates continued generosity. You give, you feel better, you are more inclined to give again. The cycle builds on itself in a way that has nothing to do with what you received in return.

What this means is that generosity is a source of real mental energy that contributes to professional longevity. In your early career, avoiding feelings of burnout and maintaining momentum matters more than almost anything else. Many of the young people I have watched burn out earliest are almost always the ones who were operating entirely in extraction mode, taking in resources, opportunities, validation, and outputting as quickly as they could in return without a sincere focus on the quality of output. It is an exhausting way to live, even when it is working. From personal experience, I know that there is a baseline anxiety that comes with always calculating and always positioning.

In practice, this means making generosity a concrete habit rather than a vague intention. Send the congratulatory LinkedIn message that you don’t need to send. Make the introduction between two people whose worlds should probably overlap, without being asked. When someone in your network shares a project or a milestone, engage with it genuinely and specifically. Not a thumbs up, but a real sentence. Show up to the events that matter to the people you respect, before those people are impressive enough for it to feel transactional to do so. Tag the founder you believe in. Write the recommendation unprompted. Forward the article with a one-line note about why it made you think of them specifically. None of these things require seniority, budget, or a network built over decades. They require only attention and follow-through, and those happen to be free.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

When you get on a coffee chat with someone, whether they are a peer or thirty years ahead of you in their career, the meeting should not feel like an extraction. Start by being the first to offer something real. When someone asks how you are, actually tell them. Not “I’m doing well, thanks” and a quick pivot to business, but something concrete and human, like: “I’m feeling refreshed, actually. I spent the morning with a close friend, we made lunch together and went on a walk without our phones. I’ve been trying to be more intentional about time away from screens lately.” It costs you nothing and it immediately changes the register of the conversation. You are signaling that you are a person, not a pitch, and you are giving them something to connect with before you have asked them for anything.

Too many young professionals walk into these conversations with a mental checklist of what they want to leave with, and it shows. The person across from you can feel the difference between someone who is genuinely curious about their work and someone who is waiting for a turn to pitch themselves. Ask real questions. Not “what advice would you give someone like me” as a formality, but questions that demonstrate you actually looked into what they are building and found it interesting. Something like: “I saw that your organization recently shifted toward X, and I was curious what drove that decision and what that has looked like from the inside.” Make the twenty minutes worthwhile for them too. If you have read something relevant to their work, mention it. If you know someone who might be useful to them, say so. And before you leave, say it plainly: “I want to support your work however I can, and no task is too big or small. Are there any opportunities for me to do so?” Nobody expects the person asking for the favor to also show up as a resource, which is exactly why it is so disarming when you do. You will leave a better impression by making one genuine offer to support their work than by perfectly reciting your resume, and you will also have started building a real, mutually beneficial relationship with someone rather than just collecting a contact.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The common assumption is that you don’t have enough yet to be generous with when you’re in your early career. You don’t have seniority, or resources, or a Rolodex that would mean much of anything to most anyone. Yet, generosity at the early career stage costs you almost nothing and compounds fast. I vividly remember the names of early supporters of @internshipgirl who left comments and likes and sent encouraging messages to me, and would do anything to support those individuals in their journeys that I could. Always keep in mind that people have long memories for who showed up before it was worth anything to do so.

It’s a beautiful thing to have the opportunity to connect with another human, in a personal setting or in a professional setting. I think many of the problems that exist in today’s workplaces could probably be resolved by resisting some of the systemic incentives that push us to view others as resources, and instead view ourselves as resources. Generosity as a way of life makes us happier, healthier, and more successful. The research agrees, and so does every person who has ever felt the difference between being used and being seen.

For a woman who has built her brand identity on rapidly scaling the corporate ladder, the unconventionality of “Avalon’s Night Out” is clear evidence of Fenster’s vision as a creative. Particularly on a college campus, where corporate ambitions may feel directly at odds with one’s artistic passions, Fenster offers a refreshing argument for embracing both: “When you realize that thinking outside the box is … actually a prerequisite for reaching career success, you feel a lot less fear about being creative.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw eight-year-old Avalon, sitting on the hearth of the fireplace in her childhood home. A microphone gripped so tightly my knuckles were bright, reverb turned to maximum, Billie Holiday’s words echoing through my home in the form of a small, soulful voice. I felt my bare feet in the dirt of my yard, jetéing from one corner to another, spinning and giggling in my favorite dress, choreographing a complimentary routine for my baby brother. Turns out ballet classes three to four times a week wouldn’t suffice. I developed a notch in my forehead from absorbing the vibration of the school bus in my left temple, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Ocean and Amy Winehouse and Mac Miller streaming through my tangled wired headphones before I tucked them away for morning chamber choir. I can still feel the texture of the seams of costumes lovingly and scrappily pieced together by my theatre director turned costumer, seamstress, tailor, and body positivity coach. Somewhere between the piano and the violin, I picked up the flute and made it to the first chair, only to be told that my lips perhaps were too “poofy” for this to be a long-term instrument. At the time, I took this as an insult, but now I couldn’t feel more flattered by it. And for a fleeting though meaningful moment, I enjoyed the spotlight as a Prima Donna on operatic stages across New York City. Instead of doing my math homework, I gleefully walk-ran to my voice teacher’s office at 3:35 PM on the dot, spending many an afternoon belting Italian and French arias while jogging in place or lying flat on the ground (like the pop stars do). What I lacked at times in a sense of belonging among my peers, I made up for in feelings of belonging in my creative element.

I learned quickly that confidence in yourself as a musician is the difference between a great performance and no performance at all. Perhaps this is why so many lawyers are also musicians, as we view pressure and victory as the same. Should a tiny crack appear where doubt can creep in, one’s fingers or vocal cords may forget entirely how to move as they were taught. Art is just as much the training of the mind as it is the training of the body. It comes only with the unadulterated will of both, and only with both. It is also the only medium where moving others to tears or speechlessness is a sign of a job well done. To make others experience something real—passion or hope or devastation or ecstasy—is not only requisite but is considered the definition of talent. A perfect performance on a technical level may be impressive, but without the channeling of something beyond what spoken words could ever say, a song is hollow at the center. It is a form of spiritual proof that the most effective ways of reaching others are often not through what we say or do, but through what we can make them feel.

As I grew older and new interests emerged, I found that the years of feeling the heat of critical, evaluative eyes on stage prepared me perfectly for presenting myself in high-risk, high-reward situations without fear. When I started doing social media, hate comments meant very little to me. This is the privilege that comes with having experience making big mistakes in front of real-life audiences. And just as the stage taught me to respond to the cues of my scene partners, I became adept at interpreting the nonverbal language of those I encountered once I started working. I found myself routinely filling the role of mediator, uniter, and motivator. I came to understand that much of your success in your early career is dependent on your ability to read between the professional lines. To truly influence people and gain their trust is to learn and leverage what incentivizes them on a human level, not just in their job. It was precisely in this way that the emotional muscle I built as an artist helped me scale my way into elite rooms quickly. I feel the most alive and fulfilled by running towards complicated problems in my own life, in the lives of others, and in society at large, and finding ways to solve them that challenge established limits.

Even though I understood its influence on my life, as time went on, the creative little girl inside of me began to feel like a figment of nostalgia and fantasy. After I decided to focus solely on getting into law school, I grabbed each corner of my musical impulse, folded it into fours, and laid it carefully in my bottom drawer. I would hear a song I once performed and feel something close to shame: not at the song, but at my own distance from it. I caught myself humming in the shower and then, absurdly, stopping. As if even that small indulgence was a door I had agreed not to open. Although I easily could have joined a performance group in college, there was some part of me that clearly found it far too complicated to look directly into the face of my first love as I was trying to make my relationship with my second love work. My mother would occasionally and lightheartedly drop photo evidence of my creative legacy into our family group chat. It was one part endearing and two parts confrontational to recognize that something so dear to me was closer to being memorialized than real. Each message was received like a thousand-pound postcard.

When I finally made it to Cornell Law, it didn’t take me long to find the eighty-eight black and white keys in the building next door. In between case briefings and cold calls, I would march my way up the mountain of stairs from the courtyard, make a left, and slide past the mahogany doors with fingers crossed that someone didn’t claim their spot on the bench before I did. At first, I kept this discovery a secret. It felt safe to revisit my childhood within those four walls, alone, to allow my hands to remember how to intuit while I sang, to strengthen my voice back to one that sounded like the one I grew up sharing. Soon, when friends would ask me where I was going between classes, I began to bring them with me and bare my soul. It was important to me to make the conscious choice to let them in on this part of me. It no longer felt honest to keep these pieces of me compartmentalized so rigidly. It was to say that to understand me, you must understand this too. It is for this reason that being identified as a “creative” by my peers in the Sun’s review of my event had touched me. More than just a recognition of a skill they saw, it was an identity that they were assigning to me of their own volition.

I spent years creating meaning through my music, to be vulnerable and forthcoming, and do justice to what a composer has brought into the world to reach people at the level underneath what can be merely spoken. In theatre, we would usually know after the first three scenes or so whether we had a “good house.” To have a “good house” would mean that rather than the show moving only in the direction of the stage to the audience, the audience was active in return: laughing, crying, gasping, applauding, all in the moments where performers intended them to…and then some. On the night of my event on March 6th, I recognized that same feeling immediately. The room took on a life of its own, and so had my work.

Just as I believe that a truly outstanding performance transcends the performer themselves, it has become clear to me that a truly outstanding professional life is one where the effect of your endeavors transcends you in some manner or another. I know now that music, my very dearest first love, was never something I did. It was always something I was. I could never have left it, and it could never have left me. Every room I have ever moved since has been moved by it first. I am simply the instrument it chose.

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The fragility of the experience of youth seems to come in large part because it is so public. Even when you feel invisible and unimportant, you emotionally exist on a theatre-in-the-round in front of every person you have ever felt regarded by, feverish with the hope to perform well enough for a standing ovation. And it won’t matter when your mother tells you that life is best lived without the weight of others’ opinions, and it won’t matter when your best friend tells you that the decision you made out of emotion was just because, “you are a very sweet girl with a very big heart.” The sense of exposure that comes with existing amongst others in day-to-day life, whether illusory or not, remains.

When I first began law school at Cornell, I ended a relationship of nearly five years just a few weeks into the semester. This went as one would imagine it would: I discovered that life is really quiet when you’re not accompanied by somebody all the time, and that our minds are highly skilled at filling that quiet. For the first time since 17, I experienced every feeling for the first time without another person softening the blow. With no one rushing to provide context, every single emotional experience I had felt transformational. This also meant that my defenses against the whims of others were low. I realized in an expeditious fashion that trust had to be earned.

As time went on, I began to resent my chronic affectiveness. My efforts to understand myself and the world around me better led to a deep affinity with attentiveness. In people’s smallest expressions, I discovered meaning and held onto it tightly. The energy it took for me to exist in this vigilant state, however, was nothing compared to the energy it took for me to pretend it wasn’t happening. Maybe if I could convince people that I was just a very cool, very chill girl—a fun one, a detached one, an unmoved one—I would not only feel less, but no one would be able to decipher my true vulnerability, and the chances of getting hurt would plummet.

But this logic only applied to me, of course. I will always be the first one to tell my friends to cry it out, to say exactly what’s on their heart; to be unafraid in their pursuit of connection and truth and fulfillment. What’s the point otherwise? Whose rules are you following? Why should you pretend to be someone you’re not for someone else’s comfort? I love you, I would say, and everyone feels how you feel, I would say, and you don’t have to hide it just because other people do. And if others want to pretend that they don’t feel that way, don’t they just scare you? Why would you want to be anything like them?

My hypocrisy only continued, bleeding its way into other parts of my life. For the past four years, I’ve been building a platform to educate young women on how to succeed. My sincere belief is that truly effective early career education has to reach young women in their hearts, not just their minds. That means that between sharing my templates and tools, the majority of my work is done in my one-on-one conversations. Though I am a stranger, I am trusted with the intimate details of the lives of girls whom I will never meet. They tell me of their exhaustion and their motivations and their dreams, and it is my job to see through them, not just hear them: to understand that you can’t separate your school life or your career goals from what’s happening in your own head. To stifle sensitivity in the face of these young women’s intimate confessions to me would be to deny them a witness to the complexity of their lives.

Everyone deserves a witness, don’t they?

And in this contradiction, I reach a crossroads. My refusal to compromise on holding space for the emotional lives of others is a matter of values and of purpose. It is borne of genuine conviction, but perhaps equally of the hope that those around me will feel the same duty to me. To insist on denying myself the same sensitivity that I believe in giving to others would not just be disingenuous on a personal level but would mean that everything I have built is a contradiction. It is for this reason that I have realized that the most authentic persuasion a young woman could have is her refusal to perform invulnerability.

Theory, as it happens, is much easier to hold than the moment that asks you to prove it. Recently, someone asked me what I truly felt about a circumstance in my life, and I lied. I lied because I felt like my candor was a liability. At its core, this instinct to protect myself by obscuring my real feelings is not wrong or misled, but the residual impact of the instinct is. To be clear, I don’t mean that one should say everything they feel. There are many times when things are better left unsaid, and there may be times when it is actually obligatory to keep thoughts internal. The problem isn’t whether or not the truth is expressed to anyone else. Rather, it lies in the cycle of constructing a lie you then have to live inside of, and the shame that inevitably comes from forcing yourself to buy into your own facade. It is now that I realize that being dishonest about the matters of my mind and my heart does not actually protect me. It just hardens me. It leaves me unprepared for moments that do indeed require that complete and total integrity. I must learn to be as faithful to myself as I am to the people I love most.

It is only through this faithfulness, consistently practiced, that a person can learn to receive their own sensitivity not as a burden to be managed, but as the clearest channel to everything true. The world will give many opportunities to perceptive, ambitious, and hopeful women to put walls up. Take none of them, and run.

Tonight, I’m joining Cherie from Her Rising’s podcast, That’s What She Said, to talk about staying motivated, excelling in your internships, navigating friendships + relationships as an ambitious young woman, and more. The live stream is free and virtual and I want you to be there. We will be taking audience Q+A. You can RSVP by clicking here.

Talk soon!

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As a child, I did community theatre programs each summer, took piano and voice lessons, and even started writing my own songs. One of my earliest experiences with social media was running a musical theater fan account in middle school. This is a fact I am hesitant to admit, but feel I need to in order to convey how large a part of my life this was.

As I grew older, my engagement with music became more significant. In high school, my mom drove me each weekend to practice with the gospel choir at the Mama Foundation in Harlem. I was in regular choir and chamber choir, continued my training in opera, joined the Theatre Arts Society, and competed at the state level for voice. The awards started rolling in, and for a second, I almost committed to a future as a singer. The reasons why I didn’t are a story for another time. Regardless, performing became my life. The more I sang, the happier I was.

Now, as I reflect on the decade of training that my parents invested in, I can clearly see its impact in every area of my life. While I may not perform Sondheim on stage anymore, I am “performing” in pretty much every other sense of the word, constantly. Presenting myself in interviews feels like small potatoes compared to singing a ballad in front of hundreds of my peers. Networking, cold-emailing, public-speaking, navigating crowds, getting on live television and radio, even having a large social media following that I am constantly sharing my life with–these are all natural extensions of the skills that I built through music and theatre as a child. While there are many areas I can improve in, I am happy to report that one area that is always solid is that I am a very confident person.

The Origins of Your Self-Consciousness

When you put yourself in enough public-facing situations to truly mess things up, occasionally, from time to time, you do actually mess up. I know this firsthand, and I’m so happy I do. If I hadn’t messed up, I wouldn’t have had this pivotal realization:

99% of the time, there were no real consequences when I made a mistake or put myself out there and it didn’t work. Nothing in my life actually fell apart. But I still spiraled. I felt embarrassed, exposed, convinced the person who saw me stumble was secretly pointing and laughing at me, saying all the awful things about me in their head that I was already thinking about myself.

Eventually, I realized something uncomfortable but freeing: a lack of confidence is rarely about what we can or can’t do. It’s about how much time we spend thinking about ourselves. My embarrassment lived entirely in my own head, so was I truly insecure about the thing I messed up... or was I insecure about the idea of someone else knowing I messed up? The difference is huge.

When girls message me on @internshipgirl about confidence, their fear almost never comes from believing they aren’t capable or worthy. They don’t say, “I know I’m bad at this,” they say, “I’m scared people think I’m bad at this.” Deep down, they trust their potential, but they just can’t tolerate the idea of someone else seeing them before they’re polished.

It is for this reason that I think that a lack of confidence is due to an overabundance of ego. In Freudian psychology, the ego is the part of the conscious mind that mediates between our natural, subconscious desires, and the realities of the world. The ego is responsible for making decisions, managing emotions, and using defense mechanisms to protect itself from anxiety. At its core, our ego is our sense of self. The ego hates vulnerability. It hates being seen trying. It hates being seen as imperfect. So it tells us to hang back, shrink down, or avoid taking risks, not because we’re incapable, but because it would rather protect our image than support our growth.

Solutions

Once you see that, the whole problem looks different. Most of our “confidence issues” dissolve the moment we stop obsessing over how we appear and start paying attention to what we’re actually doing. When you remove the ego from the equation (even a little bit) you realize you don’t need more confidence. You just need to stop thinking about yourself so much.

I understand that this is harder than it sounds. Pride is a powerful emotion that controls us in our highest and lowest moments. I believe that rumination is a connected materialization of pride. I have definitely struggled with this in the past: spending hours out of a day thinking through every single angle of a situation, imagining how I’m being perceived, fantasizing about all things that can go wrong or right. The only way I was able to break out of this? Getting outside. Seeing a friend. Working out. Putting effort into an idea I had been putting off. Action is the antidote to anxiety.

I know, I know. You’re probably thinking…what happens when those thoughts come back after I’m done distracting myself with action? The truth is that you can change your external environment, but if you don’t change your internal environment, nothing will truly be different.

First, I change my internal circumstances by practicing gratitude and humility.

Gratitude grounds me. It pulls me out of the spiral of “what’s missing” and places me squarely in “what’s already here.” Gratitude turns the volume down on fear because it reminds me that, even in moments of uncertainty, there is so much I’m already standing on: people who believe in me, opportunities I never imagined, and versions of myself I once prayed to become. When I choose to look for what’s good, I train my brain to stop obsessing over what could go wrong.

Humility centers me. It softens the pressure to have everything figured out and reminds me that I’m allowed to be a work in progress. Humility dissolves the illusion of perfection and gives me permission to ask questions, seek help, and stay curious. It reminds me that growth isn’t linear and that I don’t have to outrun doubt to succeed; I just have to keep showing up with integrity and an open heart.

Second, I turn outward and move my focus from myself to how I can be of service. In a professional setting, this shift is transformative. When I walk into a meeting thinking, “How am I coming across? Do I sound competent? Do I look prepared?” my attention collapses inward and my anxiety spikes. But when I redirect that energy toward, “How can I contribute meaningfully in this room? What does this team need? How can I make this conversation lighter, clearer, or more productive?” everything changes.

You’re In Control

Everyone has a different story. Some people grow up with supportive families and friends, others don’t have those encouraging systems to help them on their journey. Some people have experienced a lot of loss and failure, while others are too scared to even try. Regardless of your story, you have one remarkable superpower: the ability to create positive mental habits on a day-to-day basis to fortify yourself for when the going gets tough. You’re not alone, and you can do this.

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With so much demand for resume advice as summer internship applications come into full swing, I am excited to share with you my very best resume advice that I have gathered after doing 10+ internships!

Understanding The Tech Sorting Your Resume After You Apply (ATS)

Hiring has moved almost entirely online. Applications are submitted through portals, interviews take place on Zoom, and offers often arrive via email. As organizations began receiving thousands of applications per role, they needed a way to manage that volume efficiently.

Enter ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems)! Most students imagine ATS as a bot that rejects people automatically, but it is really just a large digital filing system. It scans your resume, pulls out the text, and organizes everything so recruiters can search for candidates using specific keywords.

Here’s what you need to know about ATS:

• More than 99% of Fortune 500 companies use ATS, and most mid-sized organizations do too. If you’re applying online, assume your résumé is getting scanned.

• It doesn’t throw away your resume because you used Calibri instead of Times New Roman. What it does do is parse your information into searchable categories: job titles, skills, education, and experience. The danger is when ATS can’t read your resume properly. If your formatting breaks, your content may end up in the wrong place… or nowhere at all.

• Recruiters search ATS in the same way you do a google search. They type in keywords and look at the resumes that have those keywords.

• Text boxes, headers, icons, photos, graphics, fancy templates make a resume un-readable to some ATS systems and recruiters.

If you actually want your applications to start turning into interviews, the first step is using a resume format that both ATS systems and real humans can understand easily. That means sticking to a clean, one-column layout without graphics, icons, or text boxes. An ATS-friendly template may not feel flashy, but it gives your resume the best chance of being read accurately. From there, choose a standard, readable font: something like Times New Roman, Calibri, or Garamond and keep your body text between 10 and 12 points, with your name on top in 2 points larger. This creates a simple structure that won’t break when uploaded into a system.

Here is the resume template I use: Free Resume Template

Once your format is solid, focus on how you communicate your actual impact. Using metrics is one of the most reliable ways to make your accomplishments stand out. Instead of writing, “Helped with social media,” try something with real data, like, “Increased Instagram engagement by 30% through strategic content planning.” Instead of, “Managed morning shift of peer tutors,” try something that highlights your leadership skills, like, “Oversaw the schedule of 5+ peer tutors, managing their service to 20+ students a day.” Numbers add credibility and give recruiters an instant sense of scale, and because they’re so clear, ATS systems parse them without any problems.

It’s also crucial to incorporate keywords from the job description directly into your resume. If the posting highlights “Google Suite,” “client communication,” or “research synthesis,” make sure those exact phrases appear in your skills or bullet point (truthfully, of course). Recruiters search ATS the same way you’d search Google, so if you’re missing the language they’re looking for, you simply won’t appear in their results.

What Recruiters ACTUALLY Look For

Students often imagine recruiters searching for the most impressive titles or the most decorated backgrounds. In reality, recruiters are looking for something much simpler: a clear story about who you are and whether you can handle the responsibilities of the role. More than that, they are looking to see that you will truly add value to the team that they are hiring you onto.

First, relevant experience always matters more than prestige. A part-time campus job where you managed scheduling for multiple staff members or handled hundreds of student questions can be more valuable than a big-name company where you only shadowed for a week. Recruiters want to see whether your past work aligns with the tasks they need help with. If it does, they will take you seriously. This is not to say that prestige doesn’t help. Of course it does! But, for example, a computer science student who can persuasively communicate how they created a website to help a major department at their college grade student work will always win over a computer science student who did SWE for a flashy startup but can’t articulate exactly what they did.

Second, clarity always wins over creativity (in most cases). A clean, readable resume tells a recruiter that you communicate clearly and understand what is important. Many students try to stand out with colors, graphics, or unusual layouts, but recruiters are not grading your design skills. They are deciding whether they can understand your qualifications quickly. In creative roles, this may be different. For example, the rise of the “branded” resume submission by marketing students to fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands shows that some companies and roles value this kind of creativity. However, barring you’re in a creative role, you don’t want to take these kinds of risks.

Leadership and initiative also stand out immediately. Recruiters pay attention to moments and roles when you voluntarily took responsibility, solved a problem, improved a process, trained others, or built something from scratch. These actions signal maturity, independence, and resourcefulness. Those qualities matter just as much as technical skills. Especially if you’re currently a junior, recruiters are looking for potential for long-term impact at the company just as much as they’re looking for a good intern, because oftentimes, companies make full-time hires out of their rising senior intern pool.

And a simple yet underrated tip: recruiters remember candidates who highlight their strongest accomplishments first. A sharp opening bullet, a strong metric, or a clear example of impact is often enough to make someone pause and take a closer look.

How To Tailor Your Resume in 10 Minutes

One of the biggest mistakes students make is sending the same resume to every position. It feels efficient, but it almost always leads to fewer interviews. Different roles value different skills, and if your resume does not reflect what that specific employer is asking for, your application will blend in and get overlooked. The good news is that tailoring your resume does not require a full rewrite. A few small changes can make your application much more competitive.

Start by identifying five to seven keywords from the job description. Look for specific skills or responsibilities the employer repeats, such as client communication, data analysis, project coordination,etc. These keywords matter because recruiters may search for them directly when filtering applicants. More than that, if the recruiter is looking at your resume in a quick glance, these are terms that will make them pause and read closer. If your resume includes them truthfully and in context, you are far more likely to be moved on to the next level.

Next, reorder your bullets based on relevance. If you are applying for a marketing internship, move your content, engagement, or analytics bullets to the top of your role description for your experiences. If you are applying for a research or policy role, lead with your writing, analysis, or data work in the first bullets. Recruiters scan from the top down, so the order of your bullets shapes the first impression they form.

Finally, update your skills section so it fits the industry you are applying to. A consulting role may care most about Excel, presentations, and analysis. A communications role may care more about copywriting, media tools, or social platforms. You are not changing who you are. You are simply choosing the parts of your experience that are most relevant to the job.

This is the one part of the process that you have full control over. Own it.

After you submit your resume, your future is in someone else’s hands. The materials you send in for your application are the last time that you have full autonomy in how you present yourself before the interview. The opportunity you get from being intentional when sending in your resume is worth the extra 10 minutes of time tweaking it. You can do this.

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That first semester of law school was long and cold and draining. Every day was packed with as many lessons on life, love, and friendship as lessons on law itself. Meanwhile, the academics were completely new to me. I had spent my entire college career writing papers that could rival the length of the Odyssey, yet I had barely taken an exam, and suddenly every final was one. It was a harsh adjustment for someone who had been told her entire future hinged on how she performed her very first semester. I braced myself for law firm recruitment with as much enthusiasm and humility as I could manage, but the pressure was immense.

For a lot of law students, by the end of 1L, your motivation feels shaky and self-esteem feels scraped down to nothing. Job placement stings. Realizing you might not be at the top of your class anymore can feel like the ground shifting under your feet. And while all of that was happening around me, something very different was happening inside me. It ended up being the beginning of the very happiest chapter of my life: I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been physically and mentally, I have the best friendships I could ask for, my dreams are coming true, and I have a really strong sense of direction and purpose.

The only reason I made it here is because I wasn’t walking in empty-handed. I had already learned, back in college, what burnout really feels like and what it takes to come out of it with some sense of self still intact. Those skills didn’t make law school easy, but they made it survivable, and I want you to carry them, too.

The Realities of Burnout

My first semester of my senior year of college, I was as busy as I could possibly be. I was a University Senator on student government, sitting on three subcommittees. I was a Student Scholar at the Institute of Global Politics. I was interning for Hillary Clinton. I was applying to law school and applying for spring internships. I was finishing a double major and a minor. I was running @internshipgirl. I was paying my own bills.

To say I was exhausted is an understatement. It felt like I woke up tired, stayed tired, and fell asleep even more tired. I would stare at my fridge and feel overwhelmed by the idea of chopping one vegetable. On most nights I ate whatever was closest to the front of the pantry because the idea of cooking felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. And even when I desperately needed company, I turned down invitations from friends because the thought of getting dressed and leaving my apartment felt like climbing a mountain. I kept telling myself I just needed one good night of sleep, but no amount of sleep ever felt like enough.

I also wasn’t taking care of myself in any meaningful way. I wasn’t eating well. I wasn’t moving my body. I wasn’t doing the small rituals that make you feel like yourself, the ones that signal you’re still a cute, fun, and energetic young woman and not just a machine completing tasks. I would catch my reflection in a window and barely recognize the person rushing around in it.

And for the first time in my life, I questioned whether I was actually meant to be the kind of person I always imagined myself becoming. Pushing through on each task was usually always doable, but pushing through all of it at once was something else. The constant uncertainty, the pressure of every application, every deadline, every expectation felt physically painful. The anxiety was relentless. On paper I was at the peak of my achievements - academically and professionally - but internally I felt like I was running on fumes. I was accomplishing more than ever before, yet I wasn’t happy. I kept trying to rearrange my schedule, but the truth was that something had to give, and I promised myself that it couldn’t be my future. It also shouldn’t have been my well-being, but that was the first thing I let slip. That is precisely the trap so many ambitious young people fall into. You’re so focused on holding everything together that you don’t notice yourself slowly falling apart.

That was the moment I understood burnout not as a dramatic collapse, but instead, as a gradual draining of energy that eventually leaves you too tired to cook, too tired to show up for yourself, too tired to accept help, too tired to feel joy, even when life looks like it should feel full. I know I’m not alone in experiencing this.

On top of all of that, the law school process was its own emotional rollercoaster. I had worked so hard for years with a very clear picture of where I hoped to end up, so when the decisions started rolling in, the mix of acceptances, rejections, and waitlists hit me harder than I expected. Seeing emails from schools I loved land in the “maybe later” pile made my stomach drop every single time. Even good news didn’t give me the relief I thought it would, because there was always another decision pending. I felt constantly evaluated, constantly compared, constantly uncertain about where I would land. That stress sat heavy on my chest, and it followed me into everything else I was trying to juggle. What if it didn’t all work out the way I envisioned it would?

All of these pressures made me realize something I hadn’t understood before: the real threat to young people isn’t the work itself, but what we believe it means about who we are when something doesn’t go the way we envisioned.

Overcoming the Real Challenge of Early Career Success (and the argument against goals)

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Too many young women lose momentum not because they lose their talent, their capabilities, or their passion, but because they don’t know how to get back up after something doesn’t go the way they planned. When you set your heart and your mind on a particular outcome, it can feel truly debilitating when that result doesn’t come to be.

This is exactly why I advocate so fervently against qualifying early career success merely by the metric of goals. Goals, while they can be helpful benchmarks, can create a false sense of failure. While I’ve certainly achieved several of my goals, there are many which never came true. If those goals were my end-all be-all moments of truth for how much potential I had for success, there are a variety of moments where I probably could’ve called this whole “career” thing off.

Missions, in comparison to goals, are broader and more resilient. They reflect your core purpose and can withstand pivots or setbacks, serving as a long-term anchor for decision-making. Once you have a mission, you can then set goals as milestones that advance it. That way, when a goal doesn’t get met in the way you want it to or at all, you can fall back on your mission to find inspiration for your next move.

I’ve met plenty of young women who were super stars in high school or early college, and then once they experienced a slow-down in their momentum, they gave up completely. I’ve also met young women who took a risk and put themselves out there only to be shut down, and then took that as an indicator that they should never take a chance again. This approach to early career success is not only ineffective, but ignorant. Most successful businesses pitched dozens if not hundreds of times only to be told “No” until that first life-changing “Yes.” Some of the most legendary singers of our modern era started their careers performing for pennies in bars before selling out stadiums. If you are expecting instant gratification or just an un-ending series of approvals, you will be disappointed by the reality. Instead, if you embrace these difficulties and take rejection in stride, you will move faster than 99% of the people around you. This is the real challenge, and those that can face it head on become the real winners.

Ritual Optimism

When I realized during my senior year that I couldn’t change my external circumstances, I knew that I needed to transform my perspective in a major and systematic change. This is where my ritual optimism comes into play. When I experience some sort of setback now, I not only look for the silver lining, but all of the many possible silver linings in a situation. I treat it like a mental ritual. Instead of sitting in the disappointment and letting it spiral into a story about my worth, I give my mind alternate explanations, better ones, healthier ones…reasons why that thing might have happened for me, or why I might be happier because of it in ways I can’t see yet. It’s my emotional insulation that keeps one bad moment from turning into a bad month or a bad year.

And here is the truth most people never say out loud: in your early career, what holds you back is usually not a lack of talent. It is the emotional hangover from something that shook your confidence. So many incredibly capable people never reach their potential, not because they are not smart or hardworking, but because they never really recovered from the emotional impact of one early setback. I have learned through this experience that optimism is not a personality trait, but rather is a rigorous practice. It is a kind of discipline; methodically and compassionately guiding your brain so it does not automatically jump to the worst possible outcome.

More than that, if success when you’re young is important to you, so should learning how not to take everything so personally (and I say that as a highly sensitive person). I used to let every comment and every small disappointment sink straight to the bottom of me. It made me vulnerable to feeling derailed all the time. When you absorb everything at full volume, you end up feeling like you’re carrying a heavy and an immovable weight in your heart.

In truth, this is where burnout starts. It is rarely a result of a heavy workload alone. Rather, it is the emotional interpretation of the stress you feel layered on top of it. When every less-than-perfect result feels like a judgment and every obstacle feels like a verdict on your ability, your system never gets a chance to rest. You are constantly managing not just the task itself, but the story you have built around it.

The ritual optimism which I described to you is the intervention that interrupts that cycle. It gives you a buffer and allows you to take a breath before you let something small turn into something defining. When you step back and choose a kinder, more spacious interpretation, you protect your energy instead of draining it and in fact, you recover faster. Slowly, you stop confusing temporary setbacks with permanent truths. This is how you avoid the kind of burnout that sneaks up when it’s given even a small opening. By deciding that your peace and your potential are too important to hand over to every fleeting emotional response, you give yourself the kind of motivation that can be pragmatically sustained.

You Are In Control

Do not lose sight of the reality that you hold the reins. You decide what your response is to hard things. You get to choose how you pick yourself up and move forward. You are the voice in your own head. If you have to live with it 24/7, make it a ritually optimistic one.

Follow me on Instagram and TikTok at @internshipgirl for more advice in short-form on your feed 💋

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Access Adobe Express’s FREE work + school tools for students here!

This week, I’m spotlighting two new features in Adobe Express that are genuinely useful for students and early-career professionals who need to produce clean, quick video content, without losing hours to editing.

Feature #1: Drag and drop editing (desktop only)

If you've ever tried to compile a video recap, presentation, or social post using multiple clips, you know how chaotic it can get. Most platforms throw everything into one jumbled timeline, and it’s on you to clean it up.

Drag and drop fixes that. Just drag and drop your assets, and Adobe Express automatically places each one into its own scene. It’s the easiest way to create a multi-part video with no extra effort.

⭐️ No more dragging clips around manually

💌 Perfect for presentations, internship updates, or social storytelling

💋 Saves you serious time when you’re under deadline

🔗 Explore Drag and drop editing →

Feature #2: Record Voiceover

Need to record narration for a project, internship deliverable, or class assignment? Adobe Express lets you do it directly in the app, with no fancy mic or extra software needed.

Even better, it comes with Enhance Speech, which automatically cleans up background noise and echo. So whether you’re working from your dorm or a noisy coffee shop, you’ll still sound clear.

⭐️ Record and edit in one place

💌 Sync your voice perfectly to your visuals

💋 Add music and polish with just a few clicks

🔗 Try Record Voiceover →

If you’re like me, you’re managing school, internship work, and probably building your resume at the same time. Tools that make life easier when time and focus are already in short supply are a MUST. Not only do tools like these support my productivity, but they give me precious hours in the day back to focus on my life outside of work, too.

Enjoy, and thank me later!

🔗 Get started with Adobe Express for free! #AdobeExpressPartner

Sincerely,

Avalon

AKA @internshipgirl