The following blog post was written by Peer Advisor Kate, a CCAS senior studying statistics and economics. Kate is also one of the RAs for the West Hall Honors Community.

My second day as a West RA, two residents stopped by with questions. I was expecting the standard “how do I submit a Fix-It?” or “why does the fire alarm keep going off all the time even though all I did was try to make popcorn in the microwave?”
I was surprised when she asked, “you’re graduating in three years, right? How do I do that?”
Two days later, I had an “event” (read: made cookies but counted it towards our programming requirement), with the intention of meeting the floor. After asking what people were majoring in, I got one particularly zesty answer: “I’m transferring to Milken, double majoring, and trying to graduate in three years. By the way, how do I do that?”
So yes, I am graduating early, which I’m really excited about! And I realize many others are considering it as well. If you’re among them, fear not! Allow this blog post to be your guide, and please, take a second to breathe. It’s going to be okay.

Step/Year 1: Set yourself up for success with a reasonable, realistic four three-year-plan. Reasonable means giving yourself wiggle room—don’t require 20 credit hours semesters! Don’t bank on getting ~exactly~ 120 credit hours—cushion with electives. And realistic means understanding when this is (or isn’t) possible to do. Can you leverage AP credits? Which summer classes you can take? If it’s not working, don’t force yourself to graduate in this weird timeline—it’s okay to do 3 + a summer, 3 + ½, or even (gasp) 4 years.
 

 
Step/Year 2: Avoid panic about post-grad life. You’ll be lulled into a false sense of security, because your friends will be mere sophomores, and you’ll think you have a long way to go. You’ll realize you don’t. You’ll work yourself into a panic. But fear not—I learned that most real juniors don’t start thinking about graduation until now, either. Some smart ways to avoid this freak out, and feel on top of things:

• Sign up for career coach emails, maximize chances of jobs/grad school!
• Go to networking events.
• Ask smart questions to parents, faculty, advisors, etc. to figure out what you want to do and how to get there, so you don’t waste your limited time.
• Look for internships for the summer—your final year will be super busy, so you want to get experience before you start interviewing, not at the same time. We can all only do so much!

Step/Year 3: Figure out your post-grad plans! This bit isn’t much different than what your senior friends are going through, except that you got here a little too quickly! My biggest piece of advice—talk to your peers. The job search/grad school application processes both seem less intimidating when you hear from others in the same boat, and get advice from other smart kiddos.
Finally, please know: if you’re ambitious enough to attempt this, you shouldn’t be worrying about post-grad prospects liking you. In my experience, honors kids are kind, funny, smart people. They’d be crazy not to. I know I do!
 
P.S.: Anyone with more specific questions about graduating early, or how I personally was able to do it, should feel free to contact me at kjones409@gwu.edu.

The following blog post was written by Peer Advisor Gwen, a CCAS sophomore studying english literature and Spanish.
In high school I was one of those kids that does everything. I didn’t think I was, but I definitely was, and so were a lot of my friends. Unlike some of them, however, when I came to GW I decided that I would keep my extracurriculars out of my studies: I wasn’t going to pursue varsity sports or major in theater or music, because I wanted to focus on other things and just do those for fun. I dropped acting for the duration of freshman year, didn’t worry about practicing oboe, and opted for a school where I could just be a club swimmer.

With my activities reduced from daily practice to a few hours a week, my first year of college had so much more free time than I was accustomed to. On the nights I didn’t have orchestra I would explore D.C. with my friends or bake cookies for my dorm-mates. Instead of swimming every day after school, I ate lunch with my Spanish class three times a week, and started playing guitar, things I’d never had time for before. And when I really didn’t want to go to practice, I’d skip. I still participated in the activities I liked, but only when I felt like it.

As the semester went on, though, I became dissatisfied with both orchestra and swim team. When I was given a more challenging part in orchestra, something I could have learned easily last year, I struggled to master it. In swim practice, sets I used to find easy were now challenging to keep up with. The final straw was the first swim meet of the season, when my times were slower than they’d been since I was 14, no matter how hard I pushed myself. Disappointed, I resolved to work harder at everything, but that quickly made me miserable as every time I practiced I would wish I was doing something else.
Eventually I realized: the standards I was holding myself to were completely arbitrary. I wanted to continue swimming and orchestra because they’re fun, and there’s no rule that says I have to be a certain speed or practice every single day, even if I did in the past. In an academic environment as competitive as ours, it’s easy to think things are only worth doing if we give them all our energy. Nobody strives to be a mediocre athlete or a musician who doesn’t really practice. But extracurriculars are supposed to be for fun, and sometimes practicing two hours per day just isn’t fun. I want to work hard when I go to practice, but other nights I’ll bake cookies and hang out with my friends instead. That means I won’t be as fast of a swimmer or as good a musician as I once was, but that’s okay. In classes we work plenty hard, so in our free time it’s important to do things because we want to, regardless of whether we do them well.

The following blog post was written by Gabriel, a GWSB sophomore studying economics, public policy, and political science.
Quick little preface to this article – I recently attended Ready, Set, Grow, a conference put on by GWSB’s two professional fraternities – DSP and AKPsi. I wanted to share some thoughts about what I learned from this weekend – feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. Thank you to my lovely fellow peer advisor and UHP Junior Ellen Boyer for planning such an excellent event!
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Hey, all. My name is Gabriel Galvez. I’m a sophomore from Sunny San Diego, California – the home of world class surf, authentic dishes, and wild, wet, west-coast sportfishing. I’m a proud Filipino-American, and I work for GW. Here’s something I’ve learned about working and having jobs.
Here’s a story. Last year, Mary sat us, the Class of 2020, down in the townhouse and told all of us our not to be intimidated by other students with jobs or internships – there’d come a time when we’d get jobs of our own and start defining our own personal successes. That tidbit, however, was a piece of advice I overlooked. I remember looking around at my older friends with jobs and I felt so inadequate. I wanted so badly to have a job – I wanted to gain experience, earn money, and be successful, all before I turned 20. I wanted so badly to be a “they” – you know, an average joe with a job that gave advice to strangers out on the street. Now I’ve got two jobs, an executive board position on a club, and peer-advisor duties. I know.
There’s this thing in the world of professionalism called an elevator pitch – it’s a thirty second spiel about who you are, your current position, and what you’ve done in that position (Lebowitz, 2017).
They normally go something like this –
“Hi, my name is Gabriel Galvez. I’m an intern at Big Baller Brand, the official clothing company of the NBA. I recently helped CEO Lavar Ball close a $2.5 billion-dollar acquisition of Nike, and we’re working on closing a deal with Under Armor and Adidas, too. We’ve also got our eyes on startups so we can expand the BBB family of brands.”
Here’s a hot take for you all – holding down a job is important for professional development, but make sure that your job doesn’t consume your life right now. We’re all undergraduates – we’re all young and have tons of potential. We have the unique opportunity to try new things and refine ourselves to our liking – we find out what we’re good at, what we’re not so great at, foods we like, people we don’t, etc. Part of the college experience is refining your own personal character – our friends, our favorite hobbies, the literature we read, etc.
Jobs are great because they help shape who we are professionally, but they will almost never define us, personally. Jobs are verses in the songs of our lives – careers, however, are the albums. And only the best albums, go platinum. There will always be time to slowly develop our professional brands. Go out and live life! The university has an obligation to get you ready for your career. You have an obligation to get ready for your life.
Too often, I have found, that people who 100% career-focused can be incredibly shallow people – there’s nothing they can talk about that isn’t about what they do. Those people can be incredibly boring. This is similar to why I don’t personally like talking to people who are 100% politics. Regardless of political affiliation, I avoid people who are 100% political because it’s all they want to discuss – I never get to figure out what they like to eat, what their hobbies are, or anything personal about them.
My calculus teacher back home always told us that we should never lose sight of the forest for the trees. The details are great, but it’s easy to miss the whole point just looking at the details. To quote famed 80’s actor Matthew Broderick, “life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
TL;DR: Don’t get caught up on having a job right away. Go out, have fun, explore the city! Grow yourself personally, and the opportunities will follow.
 

Works Cited

Lebowitz, S. (3 May 2017). How to Craft a Perfect Elevator Pitch. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-create-elevator-pitch-2017-5.