During the summer of 2025, I lived with family in Brooklyn and worked retail in Midtown while participating in an editorial internship with The Daily Front Row. The experience was incredibly valuable to me—not only as a young professional about to jump headfirst into the industry, but also as a grand-niece.

I balanced hour-long subway commutes in the kind of suffocating heat that makes you painfully aware of the fiber content of your cheap blouse with 7 o’clock dinners at my uncle’s favorite Italian spot. I balanced moments of connection with guests—recognizing a summer camp in small-town Virginia on someone’s T-shirt, or helping a 16-year-old debate options for half an hour to choose the perfect first purse on her birthday—with evenings spent learning my aunt’s beautifully meticulous process of stamping and embossing parchment for Father’s Day cards. I balanced 5 a.m. bus rides to the Hamptons for the magazine’s party of the year—stuffing hundreds of goody bags, checking in guests while feigning nonchalance as the founder of NYFW strolled past, and running up multiple flights of stairs at the end of the night to stow leftover magazines and party supplies—with turkey sandwiches and conversations with neighbors at my family’s cabana in Queens.

At the very end of the summer, I experienced a full-circle moment. During early June, I had interviewed for a position in the shoe department at Nordstrom—where, funnily enough, my very first word had been shoe. The interview went well, but I ended up accepting another opportunity. Now, I found myself back in the same lobby, attending a Nike launch event with my internship mentor. At the start of the summer, I had been nervous, waiting for my interviewer to fetch me; now, I was confident, present, and grateful. It was a vivid reminder that I had made the right choices that summer and was exactly where I was meant to be.

The summer taught me the power of mixing the fast with the slow: that I can be resilient in a challenging environment, that I can show up to a launch party alone and genuinely enjoy myself, and that what makes it all possible is having family to debrief with at the end of a long day.