Things are crazy here at work, in a reorganizational sense. Layoff notices went out last week, not to a lot of people, but enough, and across all levels of staff. (I laid off an admin. My executive director was also laid off.) While I’ve learned enough to know that I’ll still have a job come January, that’s only because the next round of layoffs won’t come until then. I’m still giving myself a 50/50 chance of being here.

But as I’m thinking about updating my resume and getting ducks in a row for a possible job search, I’m thinking back to my former jobs. I’ve already written about The Shortest Job and My First (and Worst) Job. Today we’re looking at my first “real” job.

 

Student Employment Many people wouldn’t consider their work study job as their first “real” job. After all, it’s part time and you can call in test (and proceed to study while playing Frisbee on the lawn right outside the office you normally work in). For most jobs, that’s not the case. But I learned too much while working on campus not to consider it a real job.

I started working the summer after my senior year of high school. I was originally assigned to the Admissions and Records office, where I answered phones, filed, did some basic data entry. I was there maybe 6 weeks before I was transferred over to the Financial Aid Office, specifically, the student loan office.

This was in the days before electronic funds transfer (though just barely- it started during my two years working there) and certainly beforeStaffordloans were offered direct from the government. There was lots of paperwork, copying, filing, data entry, etc that needed to be done. The student loan office had had two long term student employees, but one had graduated the previous May and the other was graduating the following December, hence me getting transferred there.

When I talk about what I learned at this job, I’m not talking about the ins and outs of student loans, the rules regarding the FAFSA, or any of the actual work I did. While I did learn all of that, and it has remained good knowledge to have (I’ve filled out FAFSAs since for my graduate education and for C going back to school), it’s rather specialized to the circumstances of higher education. The really important lessons I learned are ones that have been valuable at every job I’ve held since then and they have to do with skill, merit, and who you know.

 

Students Ran the Office Ability and competence mattered. I want to say that very clearly. There were more student employees in the financial aid office than there were permanent employees. For the life of me, I can’t even remember the permanent staff who supposedly ran the student employment and veterans’ benefits offices. I honestly don’t even remember them having desks. There were two student employees that ran those areas and ran it competently. I’m pretty certain that the guy who ran student employment was actually hired to officially run the office after he graduated.

Over in student loans, while I was never going to be a financial aid officer, determining what kind of financial aid packages students got, I did become responsible for every other step of the process, from entering applications into the system to documenting the arrival of the checks.

A year after I started working there, when the classified staff person who was my boss decided to go out on medical leave for a month before starting a new job, I trained her replacement. That’s right, I fully trained my new boss in every aspect of her job. Before she started, I ran the office for about a week on my own (during the summer, I was able to work almost full time). No one batted an eye at that. My skills and ability were trusted. I had earned that level of trust. And I was also trusted to train new student employees once the school year started.

Because of my skill and understanding, the Director of Financial Aid decided to move me from loans to the scholarship office. The previous manager of scholarships had embezzled from the university (big scandal) and the new manager and classified staff were having a real struggle getting everything back under control with all the new documentation that was having to be sent out to donors and to auditors.

I had trained the new student employees (and my boss) in student loans well enough that they wanted me over there to help. I was happy to do so.

 

Enter Politics And then it happened. The scholarship office needed more extra help than just one student employee, and so a new student was transferred from Admissions and Records to help out. She happened to be the darling of the VP of Admissions and Records (and by “darling” I mean daughter of the VPs closest friends).

Tasha was good. She was every bit as skilled at office work as I was. I don’t want to pretend she wasn’t. But I was a year older and had more experience in the office, and there were other student employees who had even more tenure and experience in the financial aid office than I did (remember the students I mentioned who were running student employment and veterans’ benefits), so it really, really bothered me when Tasha was put “in charge” of the office for the two days all regular employees were at a university wide retreat/training session. I didn’t feel like I should have been in charge, but Tasha had been in the office maybe two months and there were student employees who had been there three plus years. And we all knew more about the workings of the entire Financial Aid office than Tasha did.

None of this was Tasha’s fault, and she was smart enough not to interfere with anyone doing their jobs, but it still bothered me that the decision of who to put in charge had nothing to do with experience or tenure. The VP made the decision, and she chose the kid she knew.

This was at the beginning of my third summer in the financial aid office. As we got a little further into summer, we finally got the scholarship office under control and it was decided only one student employee was needed in there. Guess which one of us stayed?

I was moved back to student loans. Except the year before, banks had begun using EFT to transfer loan dollars and our system was actually up and operating the way it was supposed to (after a fiasco the first year). The student loan department had gotten a new student employee for the summer since I had been reassigned to scholarships. That student employee wasn’t actually a student at our university. Her father, however, was a professor there. There wasn’t really enough work for two student employees there either. And the staff had two options- give me back the work I was really good at and make the professor’s daughter start doing filing and make work (and risk her complaining to her father) or give me the make work. Again, guess which decision was made?

 

I Was/Am Not Perfect Now, it so happened that the previous year I had let my grades fall and lost my scholarship. Because I lost my scholarship, I didn’t fill out my FAFSA right away, forgetting work study (non-need) is what paid for me to have a job. As it came time for new offer letters to come out, the office realized there wasn’t one for me. There wasn’t even a FAFSA in the system for me. As the Financial Aid office, they had a policy to not employ any student who wasn’t on work study (which is a very reasonable policy).

The financial aid officer with whom I had worked the most was the person who told me that I couldn’t keep my job there past the end of the summer. At the time, I was a little fed up with the way I’d been treated and didn’t mind that much.

Things probably would have changed once the summer student employee went back to her school, but I really wasn’t thinking that far forward.

My last day was a week later. My roommate was a store manager for a video rental store and I went to work for her.

 

The Real Benefit Package While I was soured on working for the university at the time I left, the lessons I learned have stuck with me. The sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with being good at your job is a great feeling. Being good at your job can get you rewarded with new opportunities (whether you want them or not).

At the same time, someone who is skilled and knows someone is going to get promoted over someone who is just as skilled but doesn’t know anyone. And power over people within an organization is not always straight up and down- no one wanted to risk upsetting a professor, even though he had no power over financial aid.

I learned not to blame the people who are the beneficiaries of “who you know”. Even if they ask for special treatment, the decision to give it to them isn’t theirs. I cannot make others see the world the way I do, and my sense of fairness does not matter to them.

Office politics matter.

These are lessons I’ve taken with me. I strive not just to be good at my job, but also to network, to make sure that I know “people”, or that they’ve at least seen my face/heard my name before. It has taught me to pay attention to the informal paths of power, to know where I can push back directly or when I need to find alternate paths or who I can reach out to for assistance.

And most importantly, as I think about those last weeks there, it taught me that my attitude matters- and not necessarily to those around me, but to me. If I allow myself to wallow, to have a bad attitude, my ability to do my job up to my own standards suffers. The only span of control I am guaranteed is over myself.

 

Sure my time in the financial aid office was as a part-time, student employee, but I will always consider it my first real job.