The past five summers of my life have been spent working as a dock assistant at a boat club in Lake Norman. It was the first job that I ever had and soon became the only job that I ever wanted to work as a high school student.
Going into it, I didn’t really think my daily duties of deep cleaning pontoons and greeting club members would have a great impact on me, but I can attribute much of my growth over the last few years to that job. In the words of my former assistant manager, I grew from a "shy high school girl" into a "confident amazing woman."
She wasn’t the only person who took note of that.
This past August, as I was power washing the bow of a boat, I was approached by one of the boat club members, whom I had gotten to know over the past few years. A favorite member of mine, I always catered to him and his family and was always excited to prepare their boat when I saw that they had a reservation.
He asked me, “You’re in college by now, right?”
After telling him where I went and what I was studying, he revealed to me that he was a recruiter for a big consulting firm. He expressed that after interacting with me so frequently over time, I might be a good fit for an internship at the firm. He told me that he could always tell how hard of a worker I was and how my sociability and dynamic personality could be a great fit for the job.
I was ecstatic. As someone who has always worried about my future and worried that I wasn’t doing enough as a college student, I thought to myself: “This is it. I am set.”
We scheduled a meeting in a local Starbucks for a few weeks later and in the meantime, he asked me to forward my GPA and a copy of my resume to his email.
This made me a little wary.
When I sat down for our meeting, he said the six words that I feared would hold me back from the opportunities to come: “You gotta get your GPA up.”
The following hour was a painful hour for me to sit through, as I sat there trying to engage in a strong conversation but simultaneously holding back tears.
