Paid Employment while at University

Most of my friends here have paid employment, usually for about twenty hours a week. Not everyone of course; one girl I know does molecular biology, and with the labs and the rest of the workload, she has no time and neither do most of the people in her program. Another always worked in the past, but this semester he has student teaching, which takes him and his classmates out of that game.

Another of my friends has a University-funded job where he gets paid to do things like crowd-control at sporting events. His boss sends him an email that tells him where he has to be, and when it begins and ends. A big advantage of these types of University jobs is that your bosses know you have classes and homework and are respectful of that. So when exams are coming up, these kinds of activities wind down a lot, so he doesn’t get many hours during those times. Also, he can tell his boss when he has tests and other important things, and then he gets less of the hours, and someone else gets more. Other University jobs have science students cleaning up labs and equipment, and, for more senior students, acting as Residence Advisors dealing with unruly students, conflicts between roommates, and things like that. I think these types of jobs are paid for by the government because not everyone can apply for them; the program appears to be restricted to students whose families can’t help them much.

A problem with this kind of work, though, is that there are other people who work hard for the University at things that take up a lot more time and involve a lot more responsibility and stress, and they don’t get paid at all. My ex-girlfriend works on a charity-type of program that gives the University great publicity; she started this program a couple of years ago and has been in charge of it ever since. But because it’s new, she spends a lot of time applying for grants to fund it as it runs with an absolute minimum of funding. So she works at this every evening for hours and doesn’t get paid at all. People like her can get short of money too, and she used to resent the fact that I was paid to work at one of these University jobs which involved little effort and commitment while she was working so hard for nothing. Well nothing monetary that is. During one heated argument, I told her to quit doing it if it was making her so angry. But she said she didn’t want to quit something she created that made her happy and involved things that she hoped to do in her future career. Apart from its looking extremely impressive on a resume, and producing multiple letters of commendation from impressive people, she has given herself a very thorough practical education in HR and in Management.

Then there are the people who have jobs downtown, in the malls or at fast food restaurants and those kinds of places. Some are hazardous in various ways. I know two who work in fast food on weekend shifts that end after 2 am. If one girl didn’t have a black belt in Karate, walking home after work wouldn’t be particularly safe. Another friend has a different kind of problem; she works at a high-fashion clothes store. Her original intent was that this job would mean she could depend somewhat less on her parents in order to reduce the flow of extremely annoying inquiries from her mom about what she’d been doing and what had happened to the last batch of money. It didn’t work out according to plan though because she gets a big discount on all the clothes she buys at work; she can’t resist it, and usually ends up spending more than she has made. Another guy has trapped himself into having to work to make the payments on his car, and insurance, and parking. He needs his car to get to work, but doesn’t have the time or the money to use the car for much else. How stupid is that?

Quite a few people have to start working part way through University because of changes in their family situations. My roommate's younger brother began University this year, so his parents can’t afford to help him as much as they did last year. I’ve seen the same thing happen because of parents losing their jobs or separating. One person even had to quit school at the end of last year because he was the only person in his family who could find work; he had no idea that anything like this could crop up and disrupt his entire life. But he felt he had to do it.

Then there are the rich kids: the ones who wear different new clothes every day, breeze around in a new sports car every year, and who boast about all the places they’ve been in the summer, while everyone else had to work two jobs to try to reduce their eventual debt from ridiculous to just stupid. It can be hard to avoid doing physical harm to some of these people – especially with the arrogant attitudes some of them seem to have.