Students everywhere are beginning to feel the coming dread; summer ever approaches, nearer and nearer. It is officially time to find internships and jobs for the summer. The interview period has arrived, particularly for law students who are facing the early interviewing period at their law schools. These are the weeks when the top law firms around the nation visit school after school looking for the best interviewees to hire on for the summer. For those chosen, it means increased odds for an excellent/high-paying job after graduation. For the rest, it means disappointment, rejection, and the continued need for determination and faith in oneself and the potentials of the world.
As such, I thought I’d share this poem by Rudyard Kipling in honor of those students heading off for the wonderful world of applications, dressing up, and much praying. His words of wisdom have gotten me through college applications, several job interviews, and every other time in my life when I needed a few drops of extra courage. I actually have it pasted to a bulletin board in my bedroom so I have it on hand every day. Hope he does the same for you! Good luck!
If
by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too/
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master;
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim.
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build them up with worn-out tools.
If you can make one heap of all your winning
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss.
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss.
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings–nor lose the common touch.
If neither foes not loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much.
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!
Tags: courage, determination, fighting!, if, job, job search, Law School, perseverance, poem, students
Deceptively Blonde 