"Until We Meet Again, May the Good Lord Take A Liking To You."

I started the trip with a picture of Roy Rogers and Trigger's footprints in front of the Chinese Theatre, and posted it to the class tumblr with the quote that I'm now using (slight pretension aside) to take my leave. Three years ago, I uprooted my life and decided to go to Alabama -- a school 10.5 hours away from my long-time home in North Carolina -- and it seemed only appropriate to uproot myself again and spend my last summer as a student working, learning, and living in a brand new place, almost the entire length of I-40 away. 2,541 miles. My car had been totaled two weeks prior. I didn't know how I was going to get to and from work. I didn't know my roommates. In the couple days leading up to the flight out, I was beginning to wonder whether or not this was a good idea.

Thankfully, I fell in quickly with my roommates. We'd stay up late chatting and bond over a love of donuts and good food. They had plans enough for fun "activities" that managed to get me out of the house and around the city, because I definitely would not have gone out on workdays without a schedule. We saw Venice Beach and tried out Instagram coffee shops and went hunting for a mural that turned out to be the most elusive painted wall known to mankind. If it wasn't for the squad, I would have just come out and worked and slept and kept my nose to the grindstone, emerging only for class excursions. But I had their enthusiastic adventurous from which to feed and I am forever grateful for that.

I worked two internships, one incredibly well suited for my interests and disposition, and the other not so much. I learned what I wanted in a workplace. I learned that sometimes businesses exaggerate on their websites and in interviews and it's not just the applicant who's subject to a little bit of lying on their resumé. (Proficient in css? sure. I mean, I can look up a tutorial, right?) I learned that I need to work in a place that's innovating, willing to sit on the cusp of discomfort in order to push boundaries. I need to be in a room full of people who are smarter than I am. And, thankfully, I had that at my second internship in order to balance out the failings of the other. I stuck through both -- good and bad -- until the very end. I start my drive in the morning, and I'm still here at work. Making graphics and trawling social media and working on pitch decks and loving every second of it. I'm going to walk to Sprinkles for the last time on my lunch break in about an hour, something I've done every Tuesday and Thursday for weeks now, and I'm going to miss this routine that I've settled into and the work that I get to do here.

Outside of the workplace, the class has given me so many opportunities to go to events and hear people in the industry speak. I want to go into marketing, but it's still crucial to hear the stories and the struggles that happen in a production. Everyone here is full of valuable advice, because everyone here has failed at some point in their lives and careers. It takes some of the pressure off. I don't have to be on the path to success from the outset. I can try some things and maybe some of them won't work, and that's okay. If I fall, I'll be confident standing up and brushing off the dust and finding another way up.

I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to move to Los Angeles after graduation. I will go wherever the job search takes me, but after this class, I can proudly say that I would be comfortable living here. Maybe we'll see each other again in a year, Los Angeles. Or maybe I'll just be out to visit. But "until we meet again, may the good Lord take a liking to you."