Stress creeps up on you November 3, 2006
Posted by Niels in : Personal, Work , trackbackI’m finally done with my work for Philips Electronics. Yeah, I left my job three weeks ago. But I still needed to hand in my final report, the summary of everything I did over the summer.
It was really hard for me, because I wasn’t proud of it. I lost a month of work when one of my projects ran into a dead end. In grad school, losing a month of work isn’t a big deal. I was barely making a living wage in the first place, and I was putting in 80 hours a week anyway. But this summer, I was getting paid three times as much for only 40 hours a week so I felt really guilty for losing a month’s work. That’s the dollar equivalent of 6 months of grad school work!
And my other projects didn’t exactly go through the roof. Of course, that might just be my imagination because it’s been three years since I worked a job where I only put in 40 hours a week. Maybe I just did the right amount of work for someone working 40 hours a week.
So instead of writing up my final report, I just kept putting it off and putting it off. I didn’t realize how much I had divorced myself from the process until I finally sat myself down and said, “That’s it, I’m finishing it now and I’m not getting up until it’s done.” As soon as I said that, my stomach twisted itself up in a knot and I had to just shut my eyes and plow forward.
But somehow, the work gets done. And maybe I’m not exactly proud of the finished product. I won’t be framing it and putting it up on my wall. But it’s done, all twenty pages of it, and I can finally wrap up that phase of my life and put it behind me.
Now summer’s over. For real this time.
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