In college, my financial aid package included work-study. There was a list of jobs on campus, and I ended up working in the dining hall. I don’t actually remember how this happened, but this was the “law of least effort.” There wasn’t an application process, just a box to check.
There were about a thousand freshman that ate meals together in the freshman dining hall. After meals, we would take our trays into a large room with a conveyer belt, entering through one door and exiting through another. During the busy time as meals ended, the line would start to back up. We would chat with our friends as we waited to deposit our trays before leaving.
Behind the conveyer belt, one team would separate the food compost waste from the trash waste. One team would load the dirty dishes into the 3-foot by 3-foot plastic crates. One type of container for dishes, one for the plastic cups, one for the utensils. As the conveyer belt moved, another person would stand the large trays in another plastic crate. As these filled up, we moved them onto another conveyer belt for the huge industrial dishwasher. Dirty dishes went in, and clean dishes came out. On the other side, another team was stacking the dishes in other containers to travel back to the kitchen and returning the plastic crates to the dishwashing crew. I was assigned to the dining hall clean up crew. Each shift, I was assigned to work in a specific area. The whole system was very organized, but every now and then, the system would back up. Someone would push the red panic button, and the conveyer belts would stop. And we’d fix the problem: trays stacking up on each other instead of turning the corner properly, someone needing more help in an area, something stuck in the dishwasher. I remember the dismay when my area was working just fine, and we’d have to look around for the problem to try to help.
When I think about what I learned from that early job, the division of labor allowed us to break down a complex task into simple steps. Training new staff and creating schedules were some of the tasks that happened behind the scenes and organized by the dining hall manager. I learned to appreciate these details in the complex tasks that I would undertake in the future.
When I wasn’t working, I often ate with my friends or roommates from the dorm. Since this was before cell phones, we would congregate in the dorm halls just before meal times. At some point, we’d trek down together to the dining hall, which was about a 10-minute walk. Very few people really understood the complexity of feeding nearly a thousand people a day. We picked up trays, chose our food, and sat down at long wooden tables. Sometimes, I would stare up at the 20-foot dark wood panels on the ceiling and wonder: how did they get those pats of butter stuck up there?
One day, I was working in the dish room. I liked the mindless work, something to just do and relax my mind from homework and other school projects. I was in my zone when I heard someone say, “It’s Joel.” I suddenly realized that I didn’t tell my friends that I worked in the dining hall. It’s not the most glamourous job, and it’s not something that you bring up in casual conversation. I was always sad that I didn’t get to eat with my friends when I was scheduled to work in the dining hall. I felt hidden behind that conveyer belt, the large white apron, and standard issue dining hall cap. Suddenly, I was seen. I waved at my friends as my hands moved to stack dishes. This could have been an embarrassing moment of pretending not to see each other or the other worse scenarios that I can only imagine. Instead, my friends were genuinely happy to see me. I was the celebrity behind the scenes. As I remember this, I’m suddenly really grateful to my friends. Most of them did not have work-study jobs.
I had that dining hall job for my entire freshman year. There were other jobs around campus. My roommate had a job at the library desk. That seemed like a cool job to me: you just sit at a desk, read a book, and wait for someone to walk up to the desk. Well, the next year, I applied for a job as a research assistant working in a biology lab that studied bioluminescence. I helped the researcher with whatever work was involved with creating experiments and analyzing the date from tiny algae in water that emit their own light. I learned what it was like to be a scientist in a lab. The last two years of college, I applied to be a teaching assistant for the Introduction to Computer Science courses. At every job, I learned a different skill.
As I reflect on these college jobs, I am suddenly struck by how integral they were to my college experience and the depth of learning about life that happened outside the classroom.