I didn’t decide to go to college until I was a senior in high school. Neither of my parents had gone to college, and while I gave a lot of thought to what my future might look like in a general sense — I wanted to be an artist and writer, live in a cool loft apartment in a city, and have a foreign boyfriend — I didn’t really grasp what I needed to do to make any of that happen.
Like many teenagers, I half-believed I’d never actually see high school end.
By the second semester of my senior year, I realized I needed to get my ass in gear. I applied in February to a small state university I’d heard a classmate talk about, was accepted by March, and was offered a couple of merit-based partial scholarships in April. To make up the shortfall, I asked my dad to fill out the FAFSA. I was offered a financial aid package, consisting of a Pell Grant, subsidized student loans, and a work-study offer.
Work-study is a federal program that provides funding to schools to employ students. Eligible jobs are usually, but not always, on campus and meant to fit around students’ class schedules. Of course, being awarded a work-study offer doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a job — you still have to apply and get hired, and positions are limited.
As soon as I arrived on campus, I put in applications at the library, the fitness center, and the dormitory reception desks — the plum positions. Crickets. I applied for tutoring jobs, research assistant positions, anything I found on the online portal, even jobs that weren’t eligible for work-study. Money was money, and I had a bill to pay. With no car and no reliable transportation, I knew that off-campus work would be a challenge, but I put in applications at the few businesses within walking distance of the campus. More crickets. I began losing sleep and experiencing heart palpitations. Finally, I received a call back from the school’s alumni association. They wanted to interview me, and then they wanted to hire me.
For three afternoons a week and the entirety of every Friday, I sat in business-casual clothes in a glass cubicle in a small house-turned-office next to my high-rise dormitory. My boss was the only full-time employee. My role consisted of updating contact details in the alumni database; at most, three or four of these change-of-address notices came in per day. Once every shift, I drove a golf cart across campus to the student center, where I’d check the association’s campus mailbox.
On my way, I’d regularly zip past classmates, picnicking or socializing or on their way to the library. Everyone would smile and we’d all go, “Haha, isn’t this funny, me on this golf cart?” but it didn’t feel funny. I didn’t want to be driving a golf cart. I wanted to be sitting in the sun studying and drinking Diet Coke.
College is not for everyone, but it is for some of us—even those who can’t afford it.
This was it, the whole job. As you can imagine, these tasks did not fill 20 hours per week. It was usually a stretch to fill 30 minutes. But oddly for an on-campus job, I wasn’t allowed to do anything else — no homework, no reading or studying, no listening to headphones, no looking at the internet. I was instructed just to sit there.
Despite my anti-authoritarian views and attitude, I have almost always been a rule-follower in practice, especially when it comes to employment. I’ve also always accepted the premise that rules exist for a reason, but I could find no discernible reason for my work, and weeks on, I began to falter. I’d hide a notebook or textbook in my lap under the desk, my ears attuned to any potential movement in the office. With shifty eyes and shaky hands, I’d log onto news websites and read articles, immediately deleting the browsing history, covering my wayward tracks.
For many, many hours, I did just sit there, in an eerily silent and near-empty office, blinds drawn to keep out the beating Texas sun. I sat and thought about my classwork. I thought about the stories I wanted to write. The places I wanted to go, once I was freed from this solitary confinement, once I had my degree.
I thought about the past. My high school food service job, the clunker of a car that had given up the ghost a few weeks before I left for college. I considered the present, feeling stranded on this strange, desert-island campus, filling this absurd, charity-case position.
I thought about the alternative timelines. The freshman year experience I might have had if I had been someone else. The extracurriculars I’d participate in, the friends I’d make, the fun jobs I’d take. My roommate had a cute car, worked a few shifts a week in a pan-Asian fast-food restaurant, and spent her paychecks at the mall. Many more of my classmates were jobless; their parents wanted them to spend their first year focusing on their academics. They hung out in each other’s dorm rooms, listening to playlists they’d made on iTunes, quizzing each other with flashcards, gossiping about boys.
And here I was, bored but not badly positioned. I had escaped my hometown, my statistical fate. I wasn’t working in a fish-canning factory, or babysitting the spawn of Satan, or laboring on a construction site, or falling victim to a psychopathic boss. But I still felt a tinge of sadness, a sense of loss, the presence of a ghost that would haunt me throughout my college education as I worked worse jobs and accrued more and more debt. As I watched the people for whom it came easy, I wondered if it would always be this hard.