I wish my work space looked like this. Photo courtesy of Pixabay.
As a work-study Career Centre blogger, I think it’s about time I blog about U of T’s Work Study program.
U of T’s Work Study is available to U of T students registered in at least 2.0 courses from September to April of the school year. You cannot work more than 12 hours per week, and are paid at least minimum wage per hour. Usually, these jobs are relevant to your studies, interests, or anticipated careers.
Intrigued? Read on to hear how I found my work study position, how I make time for work with a full course load, and the lessons I learned from my current blogging job.
I lived near campus when I was a full-time student and I still had to rush to just barely make my 10 am classes but lately, I’ve been out of bed by 6:00 am and out the door by 7:00 am. I recently started working full-time while being in school part-time two days a week. I didn't quite feel done with my undergraduate experience when I first got the notification of having completed my credits so I decided to step into the workplace and get the experience but still stay in touch with academia. Before this new position, I had never worked 9-5 every day; I have had summer jobs but all with odd shift hours or 4-6 hours per shift which made sense for me at the time. Now that I have joined the workforce, I am in complete shock of how much more my body is capable of in a full day.
coffee and I, what a wonderful love story
Okay, my job didn't take place on a treacherous snowy mountain top, but it FELT like it did. Stock photo taken by ZivotNaCestach.cz via PicJumbo.
The snow was piled as high as a small dog and the wind roared so ferociously that the temperature dropped almost forty degrees below zero. I stood outside, on a street corner, with a security shirt pulled over my puffy winter jacket. This was one of my first jobs: acting as “security” for a weekend-long outdoor winter festival.
After that weekend, I—understandably—caught a cold and developed a phobia of snowmen and red and green sweaters.
Setting up Forest before tackling one of my essays
One of my goals this year—as a Career Centre blogger and as an undergraduate student—is to focus more on my career through exploring different jobs, networking, and building my skills and resume. However, as midterms and essays and extracurricular activities started to pile up during October, I realized I wasn’t contributing as much time to developing my career as I would like.
In university, I think it’s just as important to strengthen your employability as it is to get an education. An undergraduate degree is usually just four years. After that, you’re in the work force for most of your adult life. Thinking about this partly motivates me even more to prepare for life after graduation, and partly sends me into a panic.
Since October was not as balanced as I would have liked, I decided to try out Forest, a productivity and time management app. It didn’t go quite as well as I thought it would, but it did yield some career insights.
It's a butterfly... get it?
Whenever something good comes out of an unrelated event, I’m filled with amazement and unease.
I’m amazed at the way unexpected conclusions and positive outcomes can be reaped from seemingly random events in an otherwise chaotic world. Often times, situations just fizzle out in predicable and direct ways. For example, you attend class, sit where you usually do, and then leave. But it’s always amazing when you attend class, sit in a different seat than usual, and end up becoming friends with someone you otherwise wouldn’t have had you not sat in that seat. This has happened to me four times since entering U of T. It’s the butterfly effect in action, you guys.
But I’m also filled with unease. What would have happened had I not taken that seat? Would something infinitely better have happened, or something tragically worse? There are so many possibilities and different outcomes—why did this one happen to transpire?
Anyway, I’m done waxing poetic. Two unexpected events happened recently, which really got me thinking about planned happenstance again, and the ways unrelated events can spur career opportunities.
When I learned I had to write my blog about self-care for Self-Care Week, I wasn’t sure what to do. I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately set time apart to recharge before. Sure, I’ve procrastinated and goofed off when I should have been doing work, but I always felt guilty about it afterward. So, for Self-Care Week, I decided to get out a jungle-themed colouring book for “mindfulness” and destressing that had been sitting on my shelf for a while, and set aside some time in my schedule for self-care for what was, probably, the first time in my undergraduate career.
Who knew a colouring book would lead to an epiphany?
I didn't plan to have ice cream today. But sometimes uncertainty can be a good thing.
When I signed up for the Career Centre’s Planning Your Career workshop, I was ready to plan. And planning I did. I plotted out my career goals for the next three years with the help of a nifty linear diagram. My plan even had a pretty good end goal: landing my dream job after university.
This was all fine and dandy (I’ve been making colourful five year plans for the past ten years), until I remembered an underlying theme of the Planning Your Career workshop: it’s almost impossible to see the end goal of your career, since a lot of jobs are found through chance. In other words, plans are a good way to explore your career options and help develop your goals, but they don’t factor in all the unpredictable elements that go along with actually landing a job.
Calm before the storm: getting ready for b2B
I recently attended one of the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Backpack to Briefcase events, Humanities/Languages Speed Networking. University of Toronto alumni were invited to talk to students about their career pathways, and how they managed to navigate the workplace after graduation. The first half of the event consisted of discussions with a pair of alumni in small groups, and the other half involved an informal mingling period with peers and alumni. We got to ask alumni about their experiences and main takeaways from their time at U of T, their career pathways, and what relevant skills and experiences they needed to get their jobs. From listening to the various stories and opinions of the alumni, I managed to pick up these four lessons about career exploration.
When I signed up for Navigating the Workplace, a workshop offered by the Career Centre, I didn’t know what to expect. This was the first Career Centre event I had ever attended, and the event description only vaguely spoke about building goals, understanding workplace expectations, and learning effective communication skills. However, at the end of the event, I gained insight into how to effectively communicate my qualities, and about the different ways to approach career exploration.
Was my first job interview a failure, or an opportunity for career exploration?
When I was legally allowed to work and ready to become a contributing member of society, I applied to be camp counselor for a kids’ summer camp. Although I was practically a child myself and the only knowledge I had of summer camps came from an old Scooby Doo episode about a haunted campsite, I was offered an interview.
When I stepped into the interviewer’s office, he jumped up from his chair and pointed at me. “Is it really you?” he asked, in awe. “Are you the genius who put down Microsoft Word as her special skill? I’ve never met anyone so qualified and so accomplished. You are now the CEO of the summer camp.Wait, scratch that. I now dub you CEO of summer itself.”
Needless to say, my first interview for that summer camp job did not go quite as smoothly as this scenario (I never heard back from the interviewer), but it did teach me a few lessons about myself and my career aspirations, as well as the surprising benefits of failure. Of course, my experience also taught me about the dos and don’ts of interviewing (come prepared, know about the company, rehearse questions beforehand, etcetera—you’ve heard these all before), but the most valuable lessons I took away from the experience were about myself and my career explorations.
When I signed up for Navigating the Workplace, a workshop offered by the Career Centre, I didn’t know what to expect. This was the first Career Centre event I had ever attended, and the event description only vaguely spoke about building goals, understanding workplace expectations, and learning effective communication skills. However, at the end of the event, I gained insight into how to effectively communicate my qualities, and about the different ways to approach career exploration.
