My family is about as Disney as you can get, without actually being part of the Disney family. My mother, father, and grandfather have worked at Disney for a combined total of almost 111 years—longer than the Walt Disney Company has been in existence. All of them have worked for the small and mysterious division of the Walt Disney Company known as Imagineering. The so-called Imagineers design Disney’s parks and resorts and, as they like to say, “make the magic.”
For the past three summers, I have been an Imagineer, too, doing the same job my mother did when she first started working there. My mother and my grandfather have never worked anywhere else, and after working there, I understand why. (https://pestkill.org/) It truly was the happiest place on Earth. But now I have to start thinking about summer internships and I am forced to ask myself whether I want to go back to Disney for my fourth summer or, like Carl in Up, venture out to a new, constantly frightening adventure that would be non-Disney internships.
As a child, I could turn almost any aspect of my life into a reference to a Disney movie or Disneyland. I had a difficult time understanding where magic ended and reality started. I wanted light-up shoes so that I could see my feet during the elevator portion of the Haunted Mansion. In my mind, all tigers were named Raja, like in Aladdin. And when my aunt moved to Colorado and told me the fox from Pinocchio stole her, I wholeheartedly believed her. Disney was the family business, and it defined my future aspirations. I dreamed of becoming a character in the park, an animator, an Imagineer, and everything in between. I had the occasional rebellious phases in which I promised myself I would never work at Disney, but, I knew I would never really know if it would be the right place for me until I actually tried it myself.
My first opportunity to test the pixie dust came the summer before I started at Georgetown. I worked in the Information Resource Center at Walt Disney Imagineering for the last three weeks of my summer. I instantly loved it. Original concept art decorated the walls, people walked around with paint on their clothes, and a real robotic Wall-E even roamed around department-wide meetings. For the next three summers, I watched the sun rise over Disneyland, and competed in canoe races around Tom Sawyer’s Island. I met the man who wrote Walt Disney’s speeches, and had lunch with the creative executive behind Animal Kingdom. After three summers of working at what I believed to be the happiest place on earth, I felt like I could follow in my mother and grandfather’s footsteps and have my dream job.
However, every person I know who has worked there for the majority of their careers keeps telling me to go somewhere else, at least for just this summer. So now I’m stepping out of the mouse factory, as my grandfather called it, and trying to go against the destiny that my Disney-infused life is leading me to. I am applying for jobs that do not care that I know who did the original concept art for the Pirates of the Caribbean or that every plant in Tomorrowland is edible. I am applying to companies where I know no one and which I did not know existed until I found them on Google.
At the same time, however, I am looking forward to working somewhere where I am not known by my last name or introduced as “X Atencio’s granddaughter.” I am excited to learn the ins and outs of a new business and, I hope bring the lessons I have learned at Disney with me. I am hoping to discover something else that I love on my own. I know that any internship I get for the summer will not include backstage tours of Disneyland or Mickey Mouse pretzels, but I am hoping that if I end up at the right place, I will be able to discover the pixie dust in a new way.
