Internships VS. Taking College Courses

PurpoisePal
Sat, 17 Mar 2007 21:24:28 +0000

Well, I like each option for different reasons.

The internship is really cool because it’s for a translation magazine and I like translation and I think it would be fun. It seems like it wouldn’t be too stressful, my parents would totally approve and I really like the idea of getting to translate stuff or edit or whatever (if they let me do that. I’ll definitely ask before I agree to interning). One of the Editors-in-chief was my writing teacher at Columbia last summer (adv. Creative Writing- it was awesome! :)) and I took translation as my writing elective and she was my teacher for that and she once mentioned that one of her former columbia summer program students was interning at her magazine now and she was really nice and she liked me (I speak a bunch of languages which is really useful) so I’m almost positive that she’d give me an internship if I asked her for one. The downside is that I would have to stay in the city and none of my friends are going to be here this summer so I could get bored after I finished whatever I did there for the day. If I found at least like 2 friends who would stay in the city for July it wouldn’t be so bad but I’m just afraid that I won’t get much social interaction with people my own age and I kind of need that. I like friends. lol Maybe if I spent one month doing some kind of summer program with kids my own age it would balance it out…? I don’t know. It seems risky. What if I did like a second program or something in the city with other teens? …It’s a thought.

Classes at Penn would also be fun and I would take classes that I like that I can’t take at my school like Psychology, Sociolinguistics or Economics (or some combination of those) and I would meet other kids my age so I would be around friends and the downside is that I’m not really sure how I feel about taking midterms and finals in July when I end school at the very end of June. I wouldn’t mind the essays but I really, really hate finals and I feel like that might not be much of a vacation and I’m afraid that I’ll burn out or something bad will happen. I did take advanced creative writing at Columbia last year, but there were no tests or finals so it wasn’t bad at all. And I like writing, so it never really felt like work.

It’s really tough to decide, so that’s why I asked you what your opinion was as far as what looks better. So I guess the internship would look better, but one good thing about Penn is that I would get out of the city and experience a school that hopefully could become mine for the next four years (after this next one). The magazine does seem like it would be really fun, though.