The main attraction of having a summer internship is of course the experience you’d get from being in a real-world work environment with real world responsibilities. Obviously, you would expect to learn a lot about business or sales or marketing or what have you, but I think this summer I’ve learned much a great deal about “adulting”. Adulting is anything that someone my age hates to do it seems, things that they should really start teaching in schools, but they just don’t. For example, I have never written a check in my life, I have no idea how mortgages work, and I couldn’t tell you the first thing about insurance.

Blame it on my age, technology, or my generations “laziness” but I haven’t ever been hindered by not knowing these things. For one, any time I have a minor inconvenience I call my mother to explain anything.  While it’s great to have such a safety net to fall back on, it’s about time to learn how to be an adult. I told Chris about this and he said (jokingly) it’s time to stop being a Mama’s Boy.

Now that I am 3 years removed from living at my house full time and primarily staying at school, I want to take back all the times when I was younger where I said I can’t wait to grow up, I was clearly not aware of what I was getting myself into. One instance that I remember this summer was that I had to fill out a W-4 tax form which is a standard tax form, but it might as well have been Chinese to me. I say all of this to say that I have been pushed out of my comfort zone in many ways to say the least.

For the first time ever, I created a budget since I live alone and am responsible for all my meals and travel. I started meal prepping to save money on food and I don’t have a gym in walking distance, so I must self- motivate myself to go to the gym. While there is still much to learn about being an adult I am slowly but surely making the transition even though I’m only at a beginner level taste of Adult life.

What amazes me most about Adulting is that there is no set way to do anything, and we literally grow up our whole lives in a system of structure. From the time we’re able our days are planned whether we are in school, or summer camp, or sports… its all planned. We finally get to college and afterwards there isn’t someone making us do what we must do and there isn’t ever an exact best way to do something. The only real way of learning is from you own experience or somebody else’s It’s ironic because I intern at a company that teaches Scrum (amongst other things) but essentially there is a focus on learning how to be better based on previous experiences which is also a key for “adulting”. Moral of the story: it’s ok to be a Mama’s boy.

Andrew

Andrew Tandy is a Junior Trainer plying his wares at beLithe.  Andrew will start his senior year at Wabash College this fall.