Did your dc work during college?

Parents Forum
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D09 started off with a 250 hour commitment at the volunteer center to earn a $2500 scholarship. She so far exceeded her required hours that the next year she was hired to be the volunteer coordinator, a job she held till she graduated. She was also an RA since sophomore year and a student ambassador. In her junior year, she was hired by an outside group to set up a musical program. She worked for 2 summers as a counselor at Upward Bound and for the summer after she graduated, she house sat with her then boyfriend and worked at a local summer camp. From being an indifferent HS student, she wound up graduating from a 5 year program with a masters’ magna cum laude.

Middle son was in the student government, so I didn’t require him to hold another job. One summer, he stayed upstate and worked in the finance office.

S17 works a shift as a dorm desk attendant and was recently hired for the stage crew.

42

Both of my kids worked during college term time, other than their first year. Both had worked in high school, too. They also did a significant amount of unpaid work in connection with extracurriculars and their interests.

Apart from furnishing essentially all of their discretionary spending money, the work was important to them in various ways. For both, some of it was career-related. My daughter initially intended to pursue a career in journalism, and she made sure she had a lot of paid and unpaid journalism, editing, and publishing on her resume. (Then she changed her career path, but that happened mainly after graduation. Her college’s career office used her work plan – and her modular resume that easily generated five or six different versions emphasizing different strengths and skills – as a model for humanities students.)

A good deal of her social life also revolved around one of her part-time gigs, working at a coffee shop in what was effectively the student union building, that a group of friends including her effectively took over and ran for three years. It was their clubhouse. (She’s been out of college for almost 10 years, and the guests at her recent wedding included 7 people who had worked at the coffee shop.) At one point – and without our permission, as if that mattered – she had four regular part-time gigs for the university, and she was working enough hours per week (25, I think) that she qualified for benefits. Of course, that triggered an alarm somewhere, and her hours were quickly capped.

My son’s main job related to one of his principal extracurricular activities. He was paid for 10 hours/week, and actually worked probably 8-25 hours, depending on what was going on. (There were many more 20-hour weeks than there were 10-hour or less weeks.) After his junior year and during his senior year, he also had a paid part-time job working in a lab related to his major, and he did unpaid editorial work on an academic journal in his field.

Did it affect their grades? Maybe, a little. There’s no question it affected their happiness, though, in a positive way. They got paid, of course, but they also got praised, they felt competent, they developed and used skills that weren’t valued in academic courses, they met challenges, overcame them, and were proud of the results.

43

D1 has had on-campus jobs for work study starting in the dining hall first year. Tutoring lab she loved because if no one showed up she could do her homework. Now works in library which she enjoys for its flexibility, if she needs a break from studying then she’ll go and stack books even late at night lol.