If the photos don’t make it easy to recognise Rachel, that’s okay. Her Facebook profile picture is non-existent. When I ask her about it over late night ice cream at Witte de With, she laughs and brushes it off. “I just don’t care for those photographs, you know?” she says, shrugging as she nibbles on her waffle.
Rachel is a 20-year-old Rotterdam native, though her family hails from Hong Kong. “My friends do call me Fine China for a reason,” she laughs. After ice cream, we head on to the Erasmus Bridge so that I can take some photos of her while the sun is still remotely out. She chose IBCoM because it felt like the right choice for where she sees herself in the future, and her interests primarily lie in the business side of the entertainment industry. “I love travel, but I figured that for my degree I would stick to my roots. It’s certainly cheaper than moving elsewhere.”
Now’s the time for change. The majority of our friends are currently full-time interns, which is why we only ever meet at odd times. “I think it’s good, we get to fully experience the real world and figure out if it’s something we are comfortable with,” she tells me. “I’ve always been interested in the music industry, but I have no idea if it’s something I will actually pursue.” We halt about halfway over the bridge. I fiddle with my camera, Rachel looks for a trash can, but to no avail. “Did IBCoM really align with what you had in mind for it?” I ask her. She grimaces a little, thinks about it, and then answers, “I think we could use more practical knowledge, you know? Classes are great and all that, but it would be nice to have a little more knowledge about what it’s really out there in the workforce. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, and I wish we’d stop portraying it that way, too.”
To round things off because we’re tired – I had work 9-to-5, Rachel had a resit – I ask her where she sees herself in five years. That’s an easy one. I can tell because she starts talking excitedly, animatedly. “I want to live in Japan and be a dog mom!” Doesn’t she want to be employed? “Yeah, sure, that too.”