Hey There

It took me a while to sort through the employment paperwork in my Freshman year and by the time I figured it out, all the hiring had been done - much to my disappointment. I remember frantically applying to all the open positions without much luck and my first job was completely random. Toward the end of the Semester, I received a call to be a light board operator for theatre productions. I'd never done theatre nor did I know a thing about lights. I took it because I did want to make money on the side and thought it would be cool to learn a new skill. What I did not realize is I would give up 4 hours every night between Wednesday and Sunday almost every week to handle operating the lights for the same production, over and over again until I knew all the actors' lines by heart. I'm not complaining, I got a great view of the highly-demanded shows and honestly enjoyed my time. The takeaway though is to get a convenient job early on in the Semester!

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Following my pattern of stepping into the unknown, I had another job in the dance department. I can not dance to save my life. Thankfully this just needed me to watch and write. My college has strong Theater and Music departments and I would interview the producers and actors of student-run performances to create write-ups for the hand-outs given to the audience during their productions as well as compile the information to produce our Semester Dance journal. 

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I came into the Freshman Spring Semester with a vengeance. I have to find a job that has minimal work and maximum pay. Who wants a job where they actually have to work? So I applied right at the beginning of the Semester and got one of the most coveted jobs on the market after two rounds of interviews. A library job! You know what that means, don't you? Sit behind a desk, do your own work, and on the rare occasion someone walks up to you, help this with their needs - a book or a phone charger. Wrong! I went through 20 hours of paid training to learn how to re-shelf books, manage reserves, use the library system, and every in and out of the library, which by itself was fine and interesting. Where it got challenging though is that I actually had to do work every shift. Then this one fateful day, I was on the spooky third floor of our old library, where the white shirts swayed and you can Hera the wind against the window panels and the creek of the floor and the absence of any other human, to do inventory ( make sure all the books are in place by reading their ID and cross-listing the numbers to a list of all books that should be there in the library) when the worst thing possible happened to someone who has a phobia of the dark. The lights ... went off. I have never run that fast. I sprinted trying to find the stairways, flung the door open, leaping 5 stairs at a time without a thought in my head. Looks like I started running that day and never stopped, because that was the day I hung up my boots at the Mccabe Library.

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It gets better, I promise. After a host of rejections, I got possibly the best campus job possible. Let the stats talk itself - out of 64 applicants, I was the 1 selected to manage Underhill Library. Some key differences - Underhill is not the main library, it's possibly the prettiest of the 3 campus libraries and it's tucked away in the Music building, which means not a lot of people come by. And the few who know about its beauties are loyal patrons who often do not have any needs. Here I got the job I always wanted - to get paid to sit on a chair and do my own work. I made friends with everyone in the library since it was such a small group of us and unlike my previous job, socializing was allowed. And lastly, this job was in the highest paid tier ( unlike the previous one) because we were mostly unsupervised and had a lot of responsibility. Once a week I had a two-hour shift doing work such as inventory ( yes, again) but it wasn't as bad in this smaller library. For the most of it, I got a pretty desk with a pretty view and great music wafting in every time someone opened the door. I worked here 11 hours a week. I eventually had to drop this great job because I had other opportunities to do paid research that was making me cross the 20-hour limit we have on working campus jobs. 

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Okay, this job is hard to beat, it has been amazing. The media center is where we help students and professors print huge academic posters or anything they need really to do with acads. I got to learn how to use Adobe software and have a lot of fun playing around with the gadgets. The people who came would always be so passionate about their projects and tell me everything about it as we'd put their posters together. The supervisor was so child out - I was never stressed if were running late and he'd give us coffee breaks pretty often and hold weekly cookie+milk team meets. Word of advice? Go for the jobs with laid-back advisors. College gets so busy and stressful, you don't need someone who stresses you out more. No job is worth the stress.

 

 

Again, I have never studied linguistics nor do I know anything about computational stuff. A linguistic professor at my college needed a special device built for his research in Speech Science. And he was looking for an engineering student to help him and I said yes let's work on it. Starting in August last year, with no prior knowledge, I self-learned how to design using 3-d designing software (Blender and Fusion 360), take scans of existing models for dimensions, and through a lot of trial and error print a model for his research. This was such a new experience and I loved it because it made me spend a lot of time in the Makerspace - a new building in my college where students can build things. While waiting for my designs to print, I learned to use so many new machines like the laser cutter, pottery wheel, woodwork saws, and anything I saw others using really. I would walk up to them and they'd teach me how to. Although my project was frustrating many times when I felt stuck with the design and didn't know how to fix the flaws, spending hours working on it it made me a better person, a more curious student, and a more skilled individual - and that is the best kind of job there is.

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Although this wasn't a job posting on JobX ( the site where new jobs are constantly added and you can apply for positions), my friend in the Political Science department got an email from his professor looking for students to help him with some finishing work for his latest book. Now I am a huge fan of this professor - a Behavioral Economist who is one of the friendliest people I know. I reached out to him through email and after a month, got the position. I had the opportunity to work with him, his colleague at the World Bank, and another at Oxford to put together their book on Behavioral Units around the world. Another great experience, challenging work, and a lot of personal growth. 

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It was a great experience because it pushed me to work in a collaborative effort. I was appointed by the head of the economics department to work in a group of 3 to transform how students in my college can access opportunities to work and study economics outside the campus. I got to think of the big-picture strategy and also execute the plan. I think it's very helpful to have experience working in a group because when you apply for jobs post-college, you will 100% get the question of taking about the time you worked in a group. 

 

 

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I was invited to manage the women's soccer team - a great position if you have the time. Unfortunately, I was overloading on courses ( taking one more course than the regular load) and my schedule was so busy I knew I wouldn't have the dedication needed for this role. However, if you feel like you can put it in your schedule, nothing makes you grow your skillset as much as managing an athletic team, and every student manager I have spoken to has loved their time working with a team. This role typically includes sitting through their practices daily and traveling with the team to tournaments, which makes you very close to the athletes on the team of course - a perk in college. As a club athlete myself, I traveled many weekends and wouldn't have been able to meet their needs. 

I also had a job as a sustainability intern, which I was really excited about. It was at the beginning of my Freshman Fall and I got busy with so many new activities, I felt I wasn't prepared to have a campus job yet. It's okay if you get a job and feel like you'd rather spend your time elsewhere because I can guarantee you that another job can always be found but you can not get the time back. 

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