OMW to be an NYC Art Kid this Summer

I finally decided what I’m going to do this summer.

Occasionally throughout the spring semester, I have jokingly asked my parents what they would think about me taking the summer off, renting a cheap beach house for three months, and exclusively focusing on writing this summer.

They are always fully serious and behind this idea when I bring it forward. Not just because they know that I am joking and probably would never actually do it, but because they think that I am extremely burnt out and that focusing on art for a while would be a good prescription.

A lot of my friends are finding this to be the case as well. For the past three years we have succeeded in hard classes, worked during the school year to make money, then done internships during the summer to gain experience. All of which has been while living alone – our parents can’t even help by cooking us dinner once in a while!

I have four friends who have decided to take the summer off. They will move back to their parents’ house, work an hour job at Trader Joes or Whole Foods, do some (very) part-time tutoring in math or coding to look good on a computer science resume, and spend the rest of the summer recharging for the final year of school and job searching.

Hearing some of the smartest, most accomplished, people in my life admit that they believe this is the best thing to do in order to succeed in the future really rattled me. Starting more than a year prior to today, I have been working towards major internships in the finance industry. In school you’re taught that the most important internship is the one you have after junior year, because they will hopefully give you a job offer, which will free up senior year to focus on just classes and allow you to not stress about job searching or what you have to do afterwards. It sounds like the dream. Never before in my life have I had that kind of security in location and job. I have had to make last minute decisions before every summer as to what city I’ll be in and what I’ll be doing, even when I decided on a college it was only a month before the first day of school. I trust my well-decorated friends that getting rid of burnout before my last year in college is a good idea, but I am still a slave to the notion that you must grind it out the summer after junior year.

Recently though, as I have been making these jokes, I have begun to come to terms with the idea that if I do get a job in finance over the summer, I probably won’t be too happy. Because I too want myself to focus on art. Fall semester when I was in Madrid, I was posting every other day and took thousands of pictures over the six months. This semester, I’ve been doing all my photo projects the night before they’re done and I struggle to post once a week, even though I have a lot to say.

Which is why I sometimes dream about getting a one room bungalow on a forgotten coast somewhere and using the money I have made working in finance to pay for it. All of the things I have written down in Google Keep that I want to write about but just haven’t got around to would see the light of day. Maybe I would finally finish writing that novel that I planned out. And when I’m not writing, I could train for the half marathon I’ve been wanting to run, but have never had the time to be consistent with training.

The dream has started to pull me in more and more recently. I am doing internships and in the middle of the technical interviews, it was as if my brain, which has been submerged in water during the first half, breaks free to the surface and starts splashing around. And it’s yelling, something about how silly it is that I am being tested on enterprise and equity value and how to complete a DCF when I will just be editing presentations and Excel spreadsheets all summer like last year then beefing it up on my resume later.

So I have been looking into the possibility of living out a different life in the months between May and August than what my previous plan looked like. The dream of the small house and running down the beach every morning sounds good, but there is something missing --

I’ve never been one to make good art when I am isolated and locked up in a calm and quiet place like the beach house would be. For me, I need to get out into the world and live and do exciting things and meet interesting people I couldn’t have ever dreamt up. Then the art comes when I pull out my computer or notebook, put on noise-canceling headphones to all the loud things happening around me, and write about everything that has gone on. If I want to have a summer of uninterrupted writing, I don’t need to be on a quiet, isolated coast somewhere. I need to be in the hustle and bustle. I need to be in a city that never sleeps. I need to be in New York City. Once I figure out what I need to do in my life, well, I generally do it. My flight is booked for June 4^th, 2023. I’ll be landing in NYC before noon.

It all started one morning in February when I was scrolling through Handshake, LinkedIn, and my 543 row Excel spreadsheet of possible contacts and their emails I purged from the Web, and I just got tired. It is easy to be this persistent about something you really love and believe in, but it’s hard to do this kind of extreme work for something you don’t think you will enjoy. Although I love studying economics and learning the intricacies of finance, none of these jobs listed caused me any kind of excitement. I wanted to learn economics for resource allocation, and I was interested in finance so I could make money from my side gigs without having to ask anyone else for help.

I started Googling art schools instead, specifically Parsons School of Design. If I knew a little bit more about how to pick a university when I was in high school or had a little more guidance from the so-called “college counselors” in my high school, I probably would have gone to the New School. But I didn’t know anything about the real world when I was 17, who does? 

On the front page of their website, they were advertising a summer intensive program. You stay in the Parsons dorms, learn in their classrooms using their art studios, and  spend 9-5 every day with their state of the art professors. I immediately started imagining my life if I were to do the summer intensive in NYC. It seemed so idyllic and perfect.

I let myself have these daydreams sometimes, just like the remote beach hut one. I’m overwhelmed with my life or what I’m going to do in the future and so I think up this little dream and it becomes awfully real and I think to myself, What’s stopping me? Then I go to bed and the next morning when I wake up refreshed and having returned to a better state of mind, I realize that the plan I had the night before was supposed to remain just that – a far off daydream.

But when I woke up that next morning, spending the summer at art school still seemed like a plausible idea. In the following months, I feverishly went back and forth between being set on doing the intensive art program and thinking I was required to have another internship this summer. It was like watching a tennis match, whipping your head back and forth to follow the ball or, in this case, my train of thought.

It was causing me whiplash. In the literal sense. The stress from making what seemed like such a major life decision was manifesting as physical symptoms, much like the symptoms of someone with whiplash. Headaches, stiff neck, dizziness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, irritability, sleep disturbances… Eventually, my parents ran onto the court, handing the tennis ball over to our overactive yellow lab with instructions to run away and hide.

They called me in the morning of Saturday, March 18, after using the weekend to conspire with one another. They were both on speakerphone when my mom said, “We’re going to submit your application for the program. We can get a refund up until the move-in date, this is exactly what you should be doing this summer.”

And although I still feel as though that decision was wrong, I knew deciding not to do the program would also be wrong. At least this way if something goes horribly wrong, I can blame it on my parents.

That afternoon when I was done with classes, I applied to take fashion merchandising and photography. On Thursday, March 23, I got an email that I was accepted into both programs and was granted summer housing at the dorms.

The reality has been kicking in lately of my plans for the summer. In two different ways –  because what is ending one tennis match without starting another right after? Of course I was overjoyed, but I was still nervous. Half of my days I spend walking to class with an extra bounce in my step as “Welcome to New York (Taylor’s Version)” plays disconcertingly loud in my headphones while imagining living in a big city. The other half is filled with stressful thoughts. No longer about if I was making the right decision, the joy and relief I felt as soon as I got the acceptance letter made it clear enough I had made the right choice, but about fitting in.

Coming from a STEM university in the South, I’m not sure I will be able to fit in with the art school kids of New York City. Which often sends me into a spiral as I have concluded that I do not feel as though I belong in my college town, or my hometown, and what if the one place where I feel I might belong, I still stand out? It is not even majorly about the city I grew up in, people travel to NYC from all over, but it’s also about being split between being an economics kid and an art kid. Just like I don’t feel like I fit in at my college, I also feel as though I don’t entirely belong amongst the economics majors or amongst the art majors, simply because I pursue both fields.

I am stuck between two very different parts of myself and do not feel fully comfortable choosing just one, but it also gets quite isolating not having one full community from either.

One night, after having immense trouble falling asleep because The Animal, which is how I unpleasantly refer to my anxiety, was rearing its head not wanting to sleep, I awoke early in the morning. I keep a notebook next to my bed for moments like this. I often find that the middle of the night is when I have the most clarity in my life, since everything seems so simple when you’re wrapped up in warm blankets. The next morning when I reread what I had written, I was pleased. Since, I have been using it as a mantra that I repeat in my head whenever The Animal tries to make me feel bad for exploring multiple different fields.

“Amongst the artists I am the best economist and amongst the economists I am the best artist!”

Well then – off to NYC!

Yours truly,

Calihan