First 7 Jobs:

Looking back on my full resume, I’ve worked quite a lot of jobs. Some were mundane; others I always had to explain to others. My #First7Jobs had very little to do with my current career (social media management), but they all taught me things that I’ve kept with me today.

High school library: I wasn’t being paid (besides a tiny sliver of a fraction of a school credit), but it was my first job. I shelved books, I put new items in the system, I checked items in/out, I helped people who were looking for things… I discovered a lot of cool books when working there and read a lot of new things. I also learned how to work Xerox machines (an important skill in any office setting!). Another important skill was how to handle getting conflicting orders from managers. The assistant librarian was an absolute stickler for the rules (such as you can’t access your email in school, ever), while the head librarian knew that rules could be bent for certain situations (like checking in my down time for college application things). Learning the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of it was a big revelation (and showed what a good manager she was).

Farmstand cashier: I worked for $7.25 an hour ringing up produce, baked goods and various New Hampshire knick-knacks. The store was the inside of an old barn and it was open from Mother’s Day to Halloween. Do you know how cold it gets when you’re essentially outside at 7am in NH in the fall? It’s hard to count change when you’re wearing gloves. We had a number of customers who would ask questions with pretty obvious answers. A lot of what we sold was grown locally (either in the fields next door or our sister farm in Massachusetts), but they would ask if we had “local orange juice” or if the pineapple they were holding (still with the Dole tag on it, mind you) was grown by us. Even if you want to roll your eyes, you still have to be polite; not everyone may know the things you do. I also learned how rough it was working minimum wage. The assistant manager was always there and ran both front and back of house (where produce was cleaned and processed) and he barely made more than me. He was there, every day, way past sun up and sun down just to get as much overtime as possible to make ends meet and provide for his kids while I was only doing this for spending money. It really put things into perspective for me and gave me reason to push myself into getting into a good school (it took me a bit longer, I admit, to figure out that minimum wage should be a living wage).

College library: Four floors of books, magazines, microfiche and reference materials. It used the Library of Congress organizational system instead of the Dewey Decimal system, which was another thing to learn, but much of what I did was the same as in the high school. The college had a high Deaf population and I didn’t know ASL, so I had to improvise communicating with them. Libraries were founded on the idea that everyone should have access, so making sure that all patrons can use your service (or product) and enjoy it is important. Some people came to study, others to take a nap in-between classes or have steady internet for WoW raids. Making sure that everyone could enjoy the library could be a challenge (as was kicking people out when we closed at 2am).

Amusement park gift shop: A summer job where I sold shoddy knick-knacks to sunburnt families. The company had a strong “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” mentality, with managers checking security cameras to make sure you were always working! So I had to discover “busy work,” which is hard to do when it’s a store no one buys things in so it never gets dirty. There weren’t any opportunities for advancement or ways to show off, so I just focused on making everything as clean and organized as possible. It was also the summer of Silly Bandz, so I had more than one conversation about them with the younger guests.

College magazine writer: Payment was 0.66 cents a word but I was practicing my craft (my degree is in journalism). The people I interviewed for pieces were much more willing to grant interviews when it was for the magazine (while they would blow me off if it was for a class, where no one besides the professor would read it). I wrote on lots of different topics and handled tight deadlines. I also butted heads with editors who would change the ultimate message of a piece or not understand the material and change it to be incorrect. Journalism, especially the kind with physical finished products, has super tight deadlines, so I spent many long nights getting a piece out in time.

College A/V tech: In the basement of the library was the crew that made sure every projector and auditorium on the campus worked. Did you know projector light bulbs cost $600? Most of what I learned was physical skills, like wiring things, but since I was the most junior person I was the one who got to explain to professors things like DVD regions and why they had to buy Apple port adapters. Technical things that may be easy for you to understand might be very hard for someone else, so you really need patience and the ability to communicate clearly to others to get your message across. Nowadays I’m explaining social media trends, which can be just as confusing as a tangle of cables.

Ink mixer: A small lab on the college campus was one of two places in the world that mixed custom printer ink for a major line of digital presses. Color science is really finicky; pigments are measured in fractions of grams, and the same exact recipe had to be duplicated up to a hundred times to make sure every can of ink was the same. The way we were taught to do it wasn’t the most efficient, so I figured out ways to make it more efficient, with my average time per can steadily going down over time. I also learned that mineral oil is in no way a good thing to get on your skin (it dries it out so fast!).