Canwen Xu

I finally would feel like I wasn't an outsider.

And that was kind of, you know, how I try to resolve these conflicts.

So I got this very, very prestigious internship in private equity.

I worked my ass off.

During the summer, I was like, I was working, you know, 9am to 11pm regularly, I would go in on the weekends.

And it was one of those internships where, you know, everyone knew if you got it, it was like, people on campus would come up to me, and they would be like, you know, how did you get this internship, whatever.

And kind of the point of the internship was that at the end of the summer, you get a return offer, which means that you get a full time job.

And generally speaking, it was like, if you get the internship, there's a very good chance you're going to get a return offer.

So when I got the internship, I was like, my life is set.

I'm going to get the return offer.

I'm going to be super rich.

I'm going to be so successful.

Everyone's going to want to be my friend, whatever.

And then at the end of the summer, I didn't get the return offer.

And it basically sent me down this spiral where I didn't become obsessed with someone else, but I...

felt like I had to completely rebuild my identity from scratch.

In that process of rebuilding my identity, what I also realized was that the building blocks for that identity were fickle in the first place.

Because even if I hadn't gotten the return offer then, you know, you never know when something in your career is going to suddenly change.

So I wanted to kind of speak to that emotional truth of that failure.

I never applied to law school, but I wanted to kind of take that emotional truth and put it onto a different situation that maybe would be a little bit more fun for me to write about.