Summer sweat
Many thanks to
kaasirpent for preventing me from writing actual content ;)
What did you do for a summer job when you were in high school/college?
Heh. Obviously my parents fed and clothed me until i was 18.
Anyway:
1. Summer after Junior year i got a waitressing job. In the UP that is one of the few jobs available to kids, especially carless kids. It was at The Stagecoach, a country and western gay bar in my hometown.
I'm not kidding.
I learned so much at that job, but as school was starting up in the fall they closed. So for the school year, i worked at:
2. The Dew Drop Inn. Again, not kidding. The other restaurant in my hometown, owned by a very unpleasant woman whom i'll have to tell the iconic story about later. She was extremely homophobic, and simply not a nice person. I was a busboy (busperson?) at waitress minimum wage, which means i earned $2.51 an hour and did not get tips. This was only semi-legal, but the business had less than 50 employees, was family owned, and i was legally a waitress. It sucked, but the next town over was 7 miles away, and as mentioned, no car.
3. Come the following summer, my teacher mom had the summer off, so i could use the car at the low low price of $0.35 a mile to get to work. So i found a job at Joel's, another family owned restaurant/bar in the giant metropolis of Escanaba, MI (pop around 10,000). It was okay, the staff was nice enough, and i realised that restaurants with liquor licenses offer better tips and less surly customers.
4. College! My first job was in the restaurant run by the Hotel and Restaurant Management majors. It was a "real" restaurant - dining hall credits applied but the entreés were good and the prices were pretty high, for college. Mostly parents, alumni, and Important People ate there. After 1 semester i took only prepping shifts and never showed my face on the customer side ever again.
5. Simultaneously with #4 i worked in the deli section of the dining hall proper. I made sandwiches. And that was really it. It was great, in the grand scheme of food service jobs.
6. My favourite job of my life so far, probably: Michigan State Cyclotron Detector Lab. I built detectors for collision experiments, meant to detect positrons mostly, but also looking for a variety of heavy nucleus fragments. I learned basic machine shop and some reasonably advanced electronics shop skills, in addition to many skills only applicable to particle detector cathodes and anodes. I worked there for 3 years, having got the job by putting a resumé in the mailbox of every chemistry professor in the department ;)
7. My junior and senior year i TA'ed for the Chemistry Department. That rocked - i HAD to learn the material to teach it, so it's probably to blame for my decent knowledge of all things organic chemical.
8. My senior summer the Cyclotron was short on funding, so i boxed books in the campus bookstore warehouse. That was not fun, mainly due to the number of cliques.
9. I TA'ed, proctored, and graded exams all through grad school. 1 year was required for me to get funding, after that i did it for extra cash and because it was generally enjoyable. And again, grading exams means you must know the material, in order to be a good judge of what constitutes fair partial credit.
And that about summarizes how i funded my early love for beer.
:D
kaasirpent for preventing me from writing actual content ;)
What did you do for a summer job when you were in high school/college?
Heh. Obviously my parents fed and clothed me until i was 18.
Anyway:
1. Summer after Junior year i got a waitressing job. In the UP that is one of the few jobs available to kids, especially carless kids. It was at The Stagecoach, a country and western gay bar in my hometown.
I'm not kidding.
I learned so much at that job, but as school was starting up in the fall they closed. So for the school year, i worked at:
2. The Dew Drop Inn. Again, not kidding. The other restaurant in my hometown, owned by a very unpleasant woman whom i'll have to tell the iconic story about later. She was extremely homophobic, and simply not a nice person. I was a busboy (busperson?) at waitress minimum wage, which means i earned $2.51 an hour and did not get tips. This was only semi-legal, but the business had less than 50 employees, was family owned, and i was legally a waitress. It sucked, but the next town over was 7 miles away, and as mentioned, no car.
3. Come the following summer, my teacher mom had the summer off, so i could use the car at the low low price of $0.35 a mile to get to work. So i found a job at Joel's, another family owned restaurant/bar in the giant metropolis of Escanaba, MI (pop around 10,000). It was okay, the staff was nice enough, and i realised that restaurants with liquor licenses offer better tips and less surly customers.
4. College! My first job was in the restaurant run by the Hotel and Restaurant Management majors. It was a "real" restaurant - dining hall credits applied but the entreés were good and the prices were pretty high, for college. Mostly parents, alumni, and Important People ate there. After 1 semester i took only prepping shifts and never showed my face on the customer side ever again.
5. Simultaneously with #4 i worked in the deli section of the dining hall proper. I made sandwiches. And that was really it. It was great, in the grand scheme of food service jobs.
6. My favourite job of my life so far, probably: Michigan State Cyclotron Detector Lab. I built detectors for collision experiments, meant to detect positrons mostly, but also looking for a variety of heavy nucleus fragments. I learned basic machine shop and some reasonably advanced electronics shop skills, in addition to many skills only applicable to particle detector cathodes and anodes. I worked there for 3 years, having got the job by putting a resumé in the mailbox of every chemistry professor in the department ;)
7. My junior and senior year i TA'ed for the Chemistry Department. That rocked - i HAD to learn the material to teach it, so it's probably to blame for my decent knowledge of all things organic chemical.
8. My senior summer the Cyclotron was short on funding, so i boxed books in the campus bookstore warehouse. That was not fun, mainly due to the number of cliques.
9. I TA'ed, proctored, and graded exams all through grad school. 1 year was required for me to get funding, after that i did it for extra cash and because it was generally enjoyable. And again, grading exams means you must know the material, in order to be a good judge of what constitutes fair partial credit.
And that about summarizes how i funded my early love for beer.
:D