Resilience. My mother always tells me that it’s okay to not be the smartest, the most intelligent, the most talented, the most gifted person in the room, as long as I am the most resilient person in the room. When intelligence and talent betray us, it is our grit and determination to win that takes us to the finishing line. As an undergraduate student of BBA at Northeastern University in Boston, I set my goal to intern at the most selective company that came to campus: Amazon Web Services.
Starting from my first semester, I worked hard to maintain a high GPA which as I learned from the faculty, the company gave preference to. My major was Marketing which demands excellent communication skills as a prerequisite. In addition to the constraints of limited resources in my hometown Kanpur, there was a constraint that English was not my native language. To hone my communication skills in a non-native language, to bring them at par with a native speaker, I joined multiple student debate clubs and dialogue clubs that served an environment where I could express my ideas more coherently in a language that I was not perfectly comfortable with. Through concentrated efforts, practice and peer-learning, I learned about the finest detail of a language that is most often ignored: intonations. I worked hard to overcome these seemingly minute but significant barriers to effective communication and assimilation.
Apart from the aforementioned soft skill, I diligently worked towards acquiring a few hard skills that come handy in the marketing domain. For example, I learned to use marketing automation softwares that facilitate web analytics, a highly sought after practice in most companies in the recent times. By the time Amazon Web Services came to campus to recruit for internships, through consistent efforts and diligence, I had turned my weaknesses into my strengths. I ended up being the only international student among the 7 recruits that the company had selected. It wasn’t intelligence or talent that helped me achieve my goal. It was the resilience my mother instilled in me that took me to the finish line.
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