u/Bubbly_Cell8139

I’m finishing my sophomore year in mechanical now. I applied to a lot of internships, got ghosted, got rejected, only landed one virtual interview then got rejected, yk how it goes. Both my parents keep talking to me about “initiative“ and “taking initiative“ and since I don’t have an internship, I knew that this summer would be so awkward with them on my back. So I have 3 options—get a normal summer job, which obviously doesn’t hurt, but doesn’t really say anything about me as an engineer. The other 2 make up the dilemma. One of my roommates just started his masters here and also has been working for Lockheed for a bout a year to a year and a half, and from his perspective when I asked him, he said the best thing I can do is personal projects—he said CFD would be great, continuing CAD practice, stuff like that. I told him about the 2nd option, and he thinks it won’t really help. The 2nd option is this—my dad’s friend is an applied mathematics professor/researcher at Harvard, and for about 3 summers in a row my dad has asked me about going up their for a bit to “do some work/experiments with one of his graduate students” or whatever for a bit. My dad said his friend would most likely allow me to go and do “stuff“, idek what the “stuff” is at this point, maybe fluids stuff, but I haven’t even taken fluids yet so it’s just wack. I don‘t know if it would be for 2 weeks or a month or 2 months, and that also kinda annoys me, because I don’t wanna go to Boston and be all alone again after I’ve pretty much been alone in College station. I’m so over it. And both my parents seem to think that this experience in Boston would be good for my resume, and as my mom said “even better than personal projects“. My moms not even an engineer so I doubt she’s right, but I really don’t know what to do. My roommate gave me good I input, but I don’t wanna reject my parents help and make them think I‘m not taking initiative. And I don’t even know how they don’t view personal projects as taking initiative. I mean doing personal projects as an engineer is the most initiatively initiative thing there is. But what do I know. What do you guys think