I have been looking for a job for a while now- specifically one in the financial field that I could add to my resume. After a long while of looking, I was open to almost anything that remotely had to do with business.

A stumbled upon a post on the Baruch Class of 2021 page. A girl said that her company was looking for students to fulfill their job openings for “financial representatives” and that no experience is required. As soon as I saw the post, I was eager to message her. After giving her my phone number, she told me her “manager” will contact me. This is when it started to feel weird… her manager called me and was very informal. He wanted to meet with me right away.

When we met, I immediately realized that this guy was not her manager; they are a couple that both work at the company together. He began to describe the job to me, which was a super long explanation- almost an hour and a half long. The job itself is built upon a pyramid scheme, which is probably why he was so eager to meet with me. I was fine with the method at first, but after speaking to my dad at home, I realized that the job is probably not a good fit for me.

During the interview, I had to pay for a background check, and they could not give me a refund for that. Despite the fact that I did not even start working with the company, I lost money by going to this “interview”. The interview was just an attempt to recruit me so that they could make more money. From this, I learned to research job positions more before agreeing to do an interview. Even though I researched it briefly, it seemed that the company flooded fake reviews on indeed.

High school may have been a lot of things for me, but it definitely wasn’t simple. Almost everyone goes to high school, but not everyone understands the pressure of a specialized high school. Beginning in your freshman year, everything is about college, and I mean everything. Sophomore and junior year only increases the pressure. You have to maintain your high GPA while participating in extracurriculars, working jobs, taking AP classes, studying for SATs, etc…and then, by the time you’re a senior, almost everything is stressful. It’s all about who gets into an ivy league college and who gets the scholarship. Almost no one will admit how competitive it is; they’ll just sugarcoat it by saying that all of the students are happy and successful. But what they don’t tell you is that in order to succeed, you’ll have to compromise a lot of your time and your social life.

Clearly, I wasn’t the happiest in high school. I didn’t have the best experience there, and the workload consumed my daily life. I began to stay home everyday rather than hang out with friends in order to get my work done, and I started to see my friends less and less. I often felt alone, thinking about college so much that I didn’t take care of myself like I should have. I started to be unhappy with myself because I wanted everything to be perfect, but nothing is ever perfect. I think that the atmosphere of my high school took my perfectionist attitude and only made it worse and worse. Because of this, I started to grow frustrated and dissatisfied with myself, wondering why I wasn’t doing more, why I wasn’t better.

My constant strive for perfection wasn’t healthy. While I may have been doing better in my classes, I lost myself, and I compromised my own happiness. I didn’t realize how short high school truly was, and I failed to appreciate the good things about high school. Thankfully, those four years are now over. I am already enjoying college, and not gonna lie, I didn’t think I would. I already have a better perspective here, and I appreciate the awesome things I have at Baruch. Especially the free food at the Hillel!

Almost everyone at Baruch College knows about the Writing Center. The Writing Center started out as a part of the SACC Tutoring Center, but branched out into its own place. It is a place where students can go when they are having trouble with their writing assignments, need writing advice, or even just for a simple proofread. It’s always great to have another set of eyes read your writing because they can identify issues or grammatical mistakes that you never noticed. It can also help revise your writing, giving you multiple new ideas in order to make your writing sound better. The Writing Center can show you different techniques of writing that you never discovered or thought about using. As you can see in the picture below, me and my friend, Zahava, went to the Writing Center together. It is on the 8th floor. We were curious to see what it was all about, since many of our professors had been talking about the Writing Center. Someone at the Writing Center read over my anthropology paper and gave me advice on how to make it better. I was very glad and relieved to have another set of eyes read my paper. Our anthropology professor, Professor Petersen, even invited a representative from the Writing Center to speak with us. However, I’m pretty sure it was today’s class, and unfortunately I had to miss all of my classes today. At least I had a chance to visit and use the Writing Center to my advantage!

Last week I visited the Hillel club at Baruch College for the first time. My friend, another freshman, had attended it beforehand and convinced me to go there. We took the escalators down to the third floor and she practically pushed me in, encouraging me to meet new people. It was nice and almost refreshing to meet new people and see fresh faces, especially others who were Jewish like me. I met three club leaders, and even someone who came all the way from Israel to attend Baruch. The club members really made me feel comfortable, and we had conversations about where our families came from, bonding over our nationalities. They invited me to attend the IAC Mishelanu Conference, which is a conference about Israel for college students, in Washington D.C. with the Hillel at Baruch. Earlier today, I visited the Hillel Club again and met even more people, exchanging numbers with some. I learned even more about the club and that there are many more clubs aligned with Hillel, including WINGS and YOFI. I attended “Twenty Minute Mondays”, where I, along with many other club members, watched a tribute video about the tragedies of 9/11. We spoke about 9/11, and the club leader spoke about a Jewish student who passed away. Afterwards, we stood for a moment of silence and joined in prayer. It was a meaningful event to attend and I’m glad I participated in this club event.