Category Archives: Careers / Work

Finding Work On Campus

Posted on 13 September 2010 | 2 comments

Dear Friend,

You asked me how I managed to find not just one, but two, student jobs, when it seems so impossible to find any work at all. Campus jobs are highly coveted among stressed students already pressed for time but still desperately needing work, for one reason or another.

I’ve pulled together a few resources that I count on heavily to find work either within UBC or, at the very least, near it. Maybe none of it is new to you, and maybe you could even suggest some other resources for me, but I thought it would be good to put them all together in one place.

1. Work Study/Work Learn
Pay: Ranges from $12 to $20/hr, average being $16
Length: Maximum 10 hours/week

Work Study jobs for domestic undergraduate and graduate students and Work Learn jobs for international undergraduate students are definitely among the most prized jobs on campus, for their very high pay (thanks to a $9/hr subsidy).

To apply, check your eligibility first, then look up postings! You can sort by alphabetical order or (slightly more useful) by jobs posted after a certain date.

Postings theoretically remain on the website until they are filled; I’ve learned from previous experience, however, that postings don’t always go down as soon as this happens. Unfortunately, there’s also no way of seeing exactly what date a job was posted, so no clear way of guessing whether it’s really still open — so you’ll just have to go ahead and slave on those resumes and cover letters, and don’t hold out for just one job.

Also worth noting is that you can only work a maximum of 10 hours per week during the Winter Session (UBC rule). This may not be enough for people needing more money for tuition and so on, but these jobs are definitely the highest-paying part-times I know of, next to…

2. Access & Diversity
Pay: Ranges from $9 to $19/hr
Length: Maximum 10 hrs/week

I’m sure you’ve had at least one email asking if you would like to be a notetaker for a student taking one of your classes. Notetakers are paid a very decent wage by term, but did you know there are several other student positions? Yup, these are advertised through CareersOnline, or emailed to students. Jobs range from alternate text production (one of my part-times is e-text proof-reading, a very worthwhile position in my opinion), mobility assistance, and library access assistance, to peer tutoring, scribing, and exam invigilating.

3. CareersOnline
Pay: Varies
Length: Varies

UBC Career Services’ CareersOnline is the most reliable database of jobs available to students on- and off-campus that I know of. All students automatically get an account, so all you need to do is log in! You can search by many more parameters than Work Study/Work Learn: by city/location, by job type (full-time, part-time, casual, volunteer), keywords, etc.

Some of the best campus jobs, including the DRC, AMS Tutoring, and campus tour guiding, can be found here at the right times of the year.

Also frequently appearing at the beginning of the school year are jobs with AMS Food Services. Not as high-paying as Work Study/Work Learn, but more reliable in their hours, these are also jobs that get snatched up quickly. It’s best to apply as soon as you can if you want these!

I’d suggest visiting CareersOnline regularly, just to get an idea of when certain jobs appear, since you’ve got a couple more years to go, and this information will be useful to you in your later uni years.

4. AMS Safewalk
Pay: Currently around minimum wage
Length: Varies year by year

Safewalk’s been undergoing some changes, so I don’t know what the new hours and pay are like, but I do know that they’ve traditionally been a very well-paying job, so it’s something to consider if you’re a night owl.

Safewalk offers teams of two, one male, one female, to walk students around campus from 7 pm to 2 am. You’ll have to be ready to cover those shifts, so you’ll have to be a night owl to do those. This job is best for students who live on campus, and actually have a way to get back to their own beds at that hour in the morning. If you’re interested in this, send your resume to the email address listed on this page.

5. Co-op Programs
Pay: Varies
Length: Usually full-time work

I’m not sure if every faculty has a co-op program, but I know that Arts, Sciences, Engineering, and Commerce each have their own. The rules are different for each in terms of how long you have to work, and the pay ranges wildly, but what they all have in common is a fantastic opportunity to gain experience and build connections. My other current part-time job, for example, is the result of my first co-op term.

Even though the primary point of co-op is not to earn money per se, going into the co-op program can definitely be a strategic method of paying for your university education in alternating work and study terms rather than in giant lump sums each year. You also earn far more money working full-time during a term than you can part-time, and at least you won’t have to struggle with school and work at the same time.

6. UBC Grad Psychology Paid Studies
Pay: $10/hr, average
Length: Varies, about a couple of hours at a time at most

Get on the mailing list to become a test subject! Pick and choose which studies you’re willing to participate in, and get $10 in return for your time — a fairly easy, stress-free way of earning more than minimum wage when you’ve got a few spare hours. Quite a sweet deal, I think. (I haven’t done them yet, not having the time, but I have friends who said it was a great way of getting some extra cash. And it makes grad students happy. Think of how we’re expanding the boundaries of knowledge together!)

Those are all the places I can think of getting jobs from for now. If I think of anymore, I’ll let you know. If you have any suggestions, let me know! I’d love to expand on my list, just for future reference.

Love,
Lillienne

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Posted in Around Campus, Careers / Work

Irck!

Posted on 1 April 2010 | Comments Off on Irck!

Irck! This is the sound of my second failed attempt to apply to a UBC Childcare position through CareersOnline.

Last time I waited until the last day it was accepting applications before I set about getting my documents together, only to find that the posting had disappeared. I thought perhaps I had remembered wrong; my bad.

This time the posting appeared about a week ago. I spent the weekend working on my resume — my standard resume doesn’t have much of my experience working with children — and got home today intent on finishing my cover letter, only to find that the posting is once again gone!

Of course, all this just means I really ought to learn to apply to a job I want the minute I see it. Lesson learned, I hope.

Time to go back to haunting my various career websites.

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Posted in Careers / Work

Continuing the ‘Lost’ Journey

Posted on 23 March 2010 | Comments Off on Continuing the ‘Lost’ Journey

Hmm, my Blog Squad avatar seems to have disappeared from my front page. This is a little disconcerting, but not enough to push me to find out why. School is ridiculously busy at the moment (as it always is at this time of year).

For those of you who are interested in this kind of thing, there is a slam poetry event going on in MASS (Buchanan D) on March 31. You can find the Facebook event here. I will definitely try and make it if I can.

I had a really comforting discussion with some third- and fourth-year friends I bumped into today; it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who gets more confused about what I want to do with my life the older I get. It’s extremely frustrating to remember how much more direction I had in first-year; sometimes I just want to pick something and go through with it. It’s especially frustrating when talking to people who do know exactly what they want to do and are following their passions.

What if you don’t really know what your passion is, or more specifically, how to make money off your passion? What if you care about more than one thing and don’t know how to balance it all?

At the moment I’m just trying to plan out my life in the short-term and not worry too much about the long-term details. Life happens, things change, and it’s very hard to to make concrete plans. As long as I do what I feel is right and good for me at the moment, things should work out.

(NB: Please note this is only a short-term solution for the confused. Having a sense of the general direction you want to take goes a long way in helping you shape your life.)

Summer will be a wonderful time to sort out some more of what I want to do with my life!

For now, I should work on those six term papers.

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Posted in Academic, Careers / Work, Recreation

In your third year, you don’t know that you know…

Posted on 25 February 2010 | 2 comments

This is something I once heard (in Chinese):

In your first year of university, you don’t know that you don’t know.
In your second year, you know that you don’t know.
In your third year, you don’t know that you know.
In your fourth year, you know that you know.

And that, my friends, would describe my university education perfectly.

Just entering university from high school, I was pretty confident in my abilities—and while I did well overall, I found out quite a few things about myself and how I envision my learning environment that I had to work hard to create.

In my second year, I’d managed to get into third-year English Honours, so I was pretty excited about embarking on a two-year journey of lotsandlotsandlots! of English. Knowing perfectly well that I didn’t really know much about anything, it was incredibly enjoyable to just launch myself into my learning. Over the last couple of years, I’ve taken at least one course in each century of English (which is how the courses are loosely divided) and then some. That’s a pretty great overview, if you ask me.

“In your third year, you don’t know that you know.”

I’m really hoping this above statement is true because, since I don’t know what I know, I generally feel like I still don’t know very much about anything at all. (And this statement will probably continue to be true for years to come, when faced with the great sea of knowledge.)

Which is very frustrating when your friends are graduating around you left, right and centre, and you still can’t clearly articulate what exactly it is you want to do with your life this summer.

The main problem being that there are many things I ought to do this summer in preparation for applying to graduate school and to explore possible careers, such as:

  • study for my long-distance ed course which began last September and will finally finish in August;
  • possibly take a few extra courses for interest’s sake and/or to add a Minor to my degree;
  • do research in preparation for my thesis next year;
  • study in preparation for the GRE which I ought to take at the end of summer too;
  • do extra readings to fill in the gaps in my brain (no matter how many classes I take, it seems there will always be some of those…);
  • research graduate schools and programs around the world;
  • consider and decide what it is exactly that I want to study in grad school;
  • possibly apply to direct a seminar next year;
  • in which case will need to research and prepare for that;
  • learn to drive;
  • maybe visit my parents for a month, and also stock up on materials for my research while I’m in Hong Kong;
  • find some kind of publishing internship;
  • and/or work full- or part-time to fund all these activities.

And these activities do not count the things I want to do for fun, like:

  • go exploring;
  • write;
  • do some art;
  • play my piano;
  • travel someplace new;
  • and hang out with friends before they leave Vancouver forever.

My one bit of advice? If you’re thinking of grad school, consider doing the GRE at the end of your second year. Depending on your program and how ready you are for it, it may take a lot off your plate in your third year—and at least it will allow you a chance to retake it if you need to, without any rush.

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Posted in Academic, Careers / Work, Life, Recreation

Halfway Through, Halfway There

Posted on 10 September 2009 | Comments Off on Halfway Through, Halfway There

No doubt this is partially the influence of my UK and Hong Kong friends who are doing three-year undergraduate degrees and will be graduating in the spring and summer of 2010  — now that I am midway through my own university career, I find myself frequently assessing what I’m doing here and what I’m going to be doing from now on.

Or, of course, I can blame UBC for my mid-university crisis. Has anyone else noticed those giant squares painted in seemingly random spots? “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” the ground assertively philosophically asks me. “Getting the books that you told me are on my reading list, UBC!” was my mental answer at the time. But I decided it warranted a better one.

Academics
In terms of my degree requirements, after this year, I will be pretty much done, minus a thesis paper, a seminar or two, and the odd course here and there which I plan on fulfilling through distance ed. My English courses this term look to be quite spectacular (James Joyce at 9 am in the mornings, First Nations literature, and the Victorian novel? Yes, please!). I’m just struggling to decide whether I want to keep the seminar I’m signed up for or not — I just found a distance ed Sociology course that looks promising and I wonder if I really want to be doing Freud in-depth or whether I just think I should (the latter, actually). I won’t say which course I want, because there’s only one spot left and I’m afraid you might take it. Oh course-shopping, how I love thee occasionally. I probably ought to keep that seminar because I’m only doing one this year, but then again, I’m not graduating yet…

Co-op
…because I still have eight to twelve months of co-op to complete. I finished my first co-op term this summer working as a Customer Service Representative for the YMCA Camps, YMCA of Greater Vancouver. It was a really good experience for me as I’d never worked in Vancouver before or in an office environment. (My part-time job is very comfortably done alone at home.) I needed a chance to gain some basic skills and familiarise myself with Canadian working culture, and I got it. Now that I’m feeling more confident, I’m excited about the challenges that will come in my next co-op placement, which I’ll begin looking for in January. (Ha. Ha. I say I’m excited now, but I bet I’ll be stressed out like crazy when searching for said job.)

The UBC Arts Co-op Program just emailed us recently telling us that we only need to complete three four-month work terms in order to complete the program, instead of the traditional four four-month work terms. While this means I could graduate in May 2011 (on time, in other words), I found out that I don’t want to. I want to do another four-month work term just to be able to compare the experiences, and then an eight-month term because I think that’s quite a different experience altogether. Of course, it probably won’t happen all that neatly, depending on what job I’m able to find and so on and so forth (or whether I find one, period). Still, even if I do decide to just do two more work terms, I’d rather use the extra time to

Go Volunteer Abroad!
I was going to do something like that in the summer before I graduate, but hey, now the possibility for going for a whole term is opening up for me! I haven’t broken the news to my mother yet, since the fulfilment of this wish of mine is still light years away and I don’t want to prematurely break her heart. But I want very, very badly to go.

I realise there’s some controversy surrounding people’s motives for volunteering internationally. What’s wrong with volunteering at home? Don’t you see how many problems there are here your local community too? Are you going because you want to spread some of your generosity and make people’s lives “better”? Is this just something else to put on your resume? These are genuine, valid concerns, and maybe I’ll put forth my own detailed viewpoint some other day, but for now:

I went on a volunteer trip to a home for former street kids in Cebu, the Philippines, when I was sixteen.  I’m not sure that I did as much for the children I met there as they did for me. I remain so grateful for my experience there, and what I learned: that there are problems everywhere in the world and you can always do something about them. It made me look at my own home and see what I could do in my own surroundings. It remains my most valuable experience to date, but 2005 was a while back (and getting further every year) — what’s important is what I do now. So I’d like to be of some small service somewhere in the next couple of years.

And, of course, there’s always

Grad School
to think about. Over the summer I concluded that no matter how I scrimp and save, I will never save a significant enough amount of money to make a difference to my grad school fund. Therefore, I permit myself to enjoy life as much as I can now before I go out into the wild, wild world to seek funding from someone else to pay for my studies. Well, there are some info sessions coming up on just such a problem, so perhaps I will discover my solution without having to resort to buying lottery tickets. Maybe I’ll also convince someone else to give me more money to study all these extra undergraduate courses I’ve always wanted to do, but never could fit into my schedule while I’m at it…

Oh, the possibilities.

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Posted in Academic, Careers / Work, Go Global, International, Involvement / Leadership