By Matt Bae, Academic Advisor
When I was in college, I worked at a part-time restaurant job whenever I went home for the breaks. I worked as a cashier, serving food—things that I had zero experience with and were really challenging for me because I was quiet.
It taught me so much about myself– how to conduct myself professionally, how to troubleshoot, how to work with other people and also what value looks like in a workplace. If you’re working during the gap semester, here are some ways to learn from that experience.
What to do with a paycheck
You’re going to be earning money, and then you learn what to do with that. Are you going to save it? Spend it? It’s a good way to remind yourself of the value of a dollar.
How to be responsible
Beyond that, a job requires you to be on time. It requires you to be responsible and communicative. Are you going to show up ten minutes late? When you do show up, are you ready to work right away? It’s teaching you that you have an obligation to other people, to your teammates, to your company, to your customers. It teaches you responsibility—something you can bring to academics, your career, even personal relationships.
How to work with people
You might have a supervisor you love working with but a teammate you have a hard time working with. At the end of the day, you have to do your job together. The sooner you learn how to work with different types of people, the better off you are. It’s going to help you in group projects in school, in classroom discussions, talking to professors. No matter what you’re doing you’re always going to meet new kinds of people. Building up your ability to work with other people and learning how to navigate other people’s personalities is really valuable.
How to handle difficult situations with poise
One of the things I learned from years of working in a customer service role: you have to put a smile on and greet people and just listen. You might encounter people who are difficult or have something they’re not happy with. If you’re working as a cashier, for example, you have to learn how to handle that situation professionally and with poise. You learn how to listen to somebody while also letting them know what the confines of the situation are, and you learn how to relay the problem to your supervisor without alienating the customer. You learn to just listen and find out what the person needs.
In my job, I work with all different kinds of parents, students, colleagues, people from all sorts of different backgrounds. People come in with different questions, and some people have urgent things they need to get resolved. Those things get a lot easier for me to handle and a lot easier for them to feel like they’re heard if we’re being level-headed. That’s something I learned by working in a customer service role.
Keep an eye on the big picture
I would remind students that everything is part of the bigger picture—the good and the bad, those tiring shifts and those shifts you’re really ready for, a job you love or a job that maybe isn’t the best fit for you right now. If you don’t love your job, think about that and reflect on that and maybe you’ll know what to look for next time. If you love it, remember that and look for something that makes you feel that same way later on. Even if you have a really bad day, there’s always a point to it. You can always get something out of it. You just have to look at it the right way.