Well, you may be thinking what the hell did I just read?  

 

To give you a better perspective, this is a short story that I wrote in response to a semester-long project for a class called Writing 220. This class serves as an introduction to the Minor in Writing course at the University of Michigan. The process started months ago when I was challenged to take previously written work surrounding women's roles in the workforce over the past 50 years and transform it into different topics, modes, and perspectives. Overall, this story can come to fruition due to a combination of literary experiments throughout the semester, ultimately inspiring me to develop Hungry Thoughts. This short story follows a Gen Z professional navigating an intense finance internship; her surreal interactions with her corn snake Caroline dovetail with her anxieties about this new job.

 

Allow me to bring you way back in time, almost three years ago, I was a senior at Dowagiac Union High School who was dual-enrolled at our local community college taking a sociology class. In this class, the major project at the end of the semester required all students to write a research paper from a sociological perspective on a topic of their choosing and end with a narrative portion. To say the least, I was very excited to write this paper, so I decided to focus on the broad topic of women in the workplace and how their roles have changed from the Baby Boomer Generation to Generation Z. Thinking back to my high school writing, this was a piece that I was always very proud of and at the time pushed me to become the writer I am today. So with this being said, when the opportunity came up for me to take a piece from a previous point in my life and transform it into something new, I thought this project was a moment for me to take advantage of this piece of writing. 

 

When I was given the chance to transform this research paper, I really wanted to push myself and see where some of my new ideas would take me, but I knew that I needed to take a more focused approach. With this in mind, as my life has evolved, so have my curiosities and currently; I am interested in pursuing a career in finance, particularly in wealth management, so I wanted to target women's roles in the workforce, but specifically in finance. My interest in finance stems from my past experiences of always watching financial news with my father and taking a small business class in high school which propelled me forward into the business world. Once getting accepted into the Ross School of Business, I knew that I was always interested in the market and financial news, so I joined Michigan Business Women which helped solidify my fascination with finance. Additionally, over the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I had the opportunity to work as a Peer Mentor for a program on the University of Michigan’s campus called the Summer Bridge Scholars Program. In this role, I worked with students who were transitioned from high school to college by taking summer courses and helped them successfully assimilate into the University's culture through 1:1 meetings, assisting academic advisors through a weekly cohort, and creating professional and personal development events. Through my unique combination of experiences, I knew that I had a passion for finance and for helping people in a 1:1 setting. This is what lead me to my interest in Wealth Management where this career will give me the opportunity to work personally with individuals while simultaneously helping them meet their financial goals.

 

 Moving back to my project, my first experiment was an infographic highlighting some of the most popular careers in finance, the recruiting timeline for internships, and some of the top firms within each segment of the industry. This was catered towards young women in their later years of high school or early years of college that are interested in finance or business. I wanted this experiment to be a place for young women to go back to overtime and refer to throughout their career journey and recruiting process in college. My second experiment took a different turn and resulted in my piece featured today: Hungry Thoughts This short story came to be for several reasons, but the biggest reasons were that I wanted to challenge myself as a writer and write a short story for the first time in my life, I wanted to depict the struggles of imposter syndrome and I wanted to show the readers the effect it has on so many people who are especially women and newly entering the workforce. Additionally, I wanted the readers to be left on their toes the entire time while having the opportunity to develop an understanding that as Caroline the Corn Snake grows and continues to make Isabella’s life miserable this was a mirror of Isabella’s imposter syndrome. 

 

As I started to draft and develop my ideas, I knew that it was crucial for me to gain multiple perspectives to use as a guide while constructing my short story. The most influential mentor texts for me were The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson, 5 Different Types of Imposter Syndrome (and 5 Ways to Battle Each One) by Melody J. Wilding, and Milk and Honey By Rupi Kaur. Jackson’s piece was a collection of short stories that focuses on the beauty of life from a fictional perspective with very unsettling undertones. Particularly, I studied the portion of Jackson’s short stories called Choleric. This short story helped me gain knowledge on how to construct symbolism throughout a story with a growing object or living thing. From more of a research perspective, I wanted to accurately portray imposter syndrome and Wilding's piece provided me a great outlet to focus on a certain type of imposter syndrome called Superman/women. For more background, there are four different types of imposter syndrome, and one of the four is categorized as Superman/woman. This is primarily defined as someone who struggles with the feeling that they are a fraud compared to those around them. Also, in turn, they feel like they have to try to go above and beyond the normal standards to measure up to those false insecurities. Lastly, as I was writing my first section of the short story during the experiment phase, I felt like there was something missing and I thought that it would be fun for the reader to have small and simple illustrations to keep the interest of the readers throughout the entirety of the piece. With that in mind, I thought back to a previous poetry book I had read called Milk and Honey and used those images as inspiration. Milk and Honey is a collection of prose and poetry that highlights themes surrounding silence, abuse, womanhood, family, connections, and personal power. Milk and Honey came to mind because while the story is extremely riveting and is undoubtedly memorable, the images displayed are simple yet impactful and I wanted the images in my short story to have the same appeal. 

 

Ultimately, thank you for taking the time to go through my work. You have no idea how grateful I am!