My calculator, a Tipp-exed and sharpie-covered relic from my GCSE days, was the object that defined my holidays.
The dreaded question, ‘So why haven’t you started applying for internships yet?’, was dropped over a pre-dinner drink with an old family friend. Two years older and a surrogate brother of sorts, he has always been annoyingly smart. He breezed through his time at Oxford, doing very little work, and graduated last year with both a blue and a first. He then immediately landed a job in finance where he is getting paid more than my parents.
‘Why weren’t you looking for one over the summer? They’re probably already all gone now.’ More panic. I didn’t even have a written CV, let alone any idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Museums? Marketing? Media? What can one even do with a degree in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History? I went home with a mission to find my future career over the Christmas break.
Glued to my laptop, I laboured over my CV, scrolled through endless websites, and wracked my brain for any contacts I could call. My philosophy was to apply for anything and everything and hope the gods of the corporate world would point their fingers and choose me, taking over the task of deciding my life trajectory.
The first two marketing internships I found were for American Express and Barclays. ‘You’re never going to get a job if you don’t do an internship’. Well, if my wannabe finance-bro ex-boyfriend thought that was true, I might as well give the banks a shot. Filled with the faint glimmer of satisfaction at becoming a woman in finance, to the utter shock and disbelief of all my friends and family, I started on the application forms.
What I did not read in the fine print was that they required me to sit an assessment. Oh well – what’s another exam to an Oxford student anyway? I got through A Levels and university admissions just fine. However, upon opening the practice paper, I was filled with utter dread, the kind which I had not felt since I was fifteen. The ‘simple’ maths they had promised was, in fact, not simple. I had not touched any numbers since I took my maths GCSE (early), with the assistance of three tutors (simultaneously). I found my calculator stuffed in the bottom of a box of old schoolwork, joyously discarded with the genuine belief that I would never have to use it again. After working my way through the questions, I discovered, to my horror, that my highest mark was achieved by randomly selecting the multiple-choice answers.
I felt utterly helpless. Why had I been defeated by graphs and percentages and ratios? I was clever, wasn’t I? Trapped in a downward emotional spiral, the ever-looming imposter syndrome and fear of future unemployment took hold of me, and it was only after a considerable amount of tears and tea that I was consolable.
In the end, I abandoned the assessment and once again shoved the calculator to the bottom of my GCSE box. It didn’t feel like giving up. Why should I do something that I wasn’t naturally good at? If I was crying over my calculator now, what else could I expect if I actually (by some miracle) got the internship at Barclays? I would sit in the office every day and feel foolish, suffocated by numbers. I realised that I had wasted two days of my precious Christmas vacation obsessing over a test for something I didn’t even want to do in the first place, just because I thought I should.
After I had abandoned anything to do with numbers, I turned back to my original love – my degree – and focused on what I was actually good at: musing about statues and obsessing over ancient building plans. With a bit of emailing and pulling on strings, I managed to secure a position in the antiquities department of an auction house for the summer.
Will the world stop turning if I don’t get an internship? No. There’s no point in crying over maths as a Classics student. Moral of the story: don’t waste time doing something that isn’t you. My calculator will stay firmly stored away.