Gen. Y Perspective: Sharpening Them Claws
July 24, 2008
Doing the Small Jobs to Climb the Corporate Ladder
Between middle school and the first two years of high school, I cringed at the thought of taking a part-time job. School was a part-time job in and of itself, though I didn’t get a dime out of it.
However, a few of my close friends took the plunge and spruced up their future resumes. One took a job delivering the paper in her neighborhood. I stayed overnight at her house a few times and sometimes woke up around 5:30 in the morning to help her organize the newspaper contents before delivery.
On average, she got a little over a hundred dollars per payday. After she received a check for only 39 cents, she quit. The stressful but worthwhile experience would help her when she started putting her resume together in the years to come.
When we were in elementary school, another friend told me that her father, who is Chinese American, said he would financially support her because he didn’t want his daughter selling goods door-to-door.
But as she got older, the less likely that seemed. After starting college, she took a part-time job at an ice cream store. A year later, she started doing volunteer work at a local hospital. She wants to become a full-fledged member of the workaholic medical student departments and hopes to volunteer enough at the hospital so that it will look good on her medical school application.
An architecture-major friend of mine from UC Berkeley took on several internships even before transferring to Berkeley, which could give her the edge over her peers in the long run.
My first real job was an internship at YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia. Being an intern was maybe the most worthwhile experience I had during that time. Not only was I able to get a hands-on perspective, but I also learned much more than I did in my first year of journalism school.
A career in journalism was already on my mind, so an internship in a news media outlet made sense. The ability to work with seasoned professionals in that career field is a goldmine of experience for any young person. One of my bosses was a former editor at AsianWeek, and my other bosses had already spent several years in the field and had tons of experience to share with me.
The best thing a young person can have is several people who have been in your shoes and can help get your feet wet in the pool of career-savvy expertise.
Whether it is a really bad job or a great one, the jobs available to young people can provide the expertise and connections needed to advance in their field. Internships and small part-time jobs, no matter how trivial they may seem at first, are the launching pad for bigger and better things.
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