Category Archives: Rose

My Presence is a Present(ation)

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Happy December, everyone! It’s that time of year again – it gets harder to find a table in the library, the circles under students’ eyes grow ever darker, and many professors assign an in-class presentation. Public speaking! The number one fear in America! As someone who just gave a huge presentation – defending my thesis topic to a roomful of peers and professors in my department – I want to give a few tips on what (and what not) to do.

Speak slower. You may think you’re speaking at a normal pace, but if you’re nervous – regardless of how much you know the subject or how prepared you are – your heart rate will increase and so will the speed with which you speak. Pretend you’re talking to someone who’s having a little trouble hearing you – speak loudly, clearly, and enunciate.

Prepare for technical difficulties. Something is going to mess up – it’s bound to happen. Your PowerPoint won’t open, your notes won’t show, the link you embed won’t work. Think about everything that could possibly go wrong, and have a backup plan so you’re not flustered and at a loss in front of the group.

Fake it till you make it. I was one of about twenty students presenting last night, and the ones who left the best impression on me were the ones who spoke calmly and confidently about their topics and who responded to questions thoughtfully – even though I knew they were terrified. Then, there were the other ones – students who raced through their presentations, whose hands and voices shook, and who blurted out defensive answers to the questions and criticism. Feeling terrified? Get up there and pretend (or realize) that you know exactly what you’re talking about. Even if you don’t, it’ll calm you down. Ye said it best: My presence is a present. Be confident!

Improvise. Maybe the audience is getting restless, or maybe you’re running out of time and haven’t gotten to your main point. Have a few notes in your script – points you can cut out, if need be, or things you can expand upon. Read your audience and adjust accordingly. They’ll enjoy the presentation a lot more, and you’ll look like an adaptive presentation pro.

tl;dr? The gist of this list: prepare in advance. Write out a script, and decide what can be cut out and what can be expanded upon depending on how your time is going. Run through your technology and decide what you’ll do if it doesn’t work. Make yourself read your script out loud, at least three times – not only will you be able to time yourself for length (remember that you may speed up out of nerves), but you’ll be able to hear how your presentation flows. Happy presenting!

Hostess with the Mostest: How to Find a Restaurant Job

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So you want to make tons of ca$$$h for study abroad/textbooks/tuition/life? You like being around people? You’re able to make conversation, even with folks who seem to be fighting with each other? You want some job experience that will open doors (literally and figuratively) to work for the rest of your life? Oh gosh, do I have an idea for you: work at a restaurant! On the heels of my last post (life lessons learned from restaurant work) I wanted to share how one can actually get that work. Here goes.

To start with, you’ll need a resume. Anything that demonstrates experience on a team (Peer Mentor, AASP, QQAMP, camp counselor, you get my drift) and experience being personable (tour guide, tutor, overnight hostess, receptionist, Phonathon) are major. Play those up, and go to CP&R if you need help! Even better – CP&R is holding Resumania! until December 1, so if you submit your resume you’ll not only get excellent advice but also the chance to win cool stuff like a padfolio (so profesh) or free Motley drinks (flex, we hardly knew ye #librarycafechai #noregrets).

After your resume, you’ll need a list of restaurants to apply to. Plan on applying to at least 10 or 15, if you’re in a largish town or a city. Places with young front-of-the-house staff (near college campuses can be great), and if you’re old enough to get your liquor-handling license, a dive bar could work, too – anywhere classier will likely require you to have cocktailing experience. Hidden gem for entry-level restaurant work: Hostess at a corporate restaurant, like I did! Because they have have a multi-restaurant business plan, they often like people who enter the industry without experience because they can train you the way they want. Plus, you have a whole corporation working with you – they have auditors and bookkeepers and whatnot, so you always get paid on time. Check out places with decks/nice views/outdoor seating, especially if you live somewhere rainy like I do – they often see a huge business boom in the warmer months and hire temporary staff accordingly. As students who finish school in mid-May, we’re very lucky – most restaurants see tons of applications in mid-June. You’ll get a huge jump on the competition, so talk up your availability in your interview!

How to apply: Be strategic about when you apply. It’s a pretty specific process. Start reaching out to restaurants over winter break, and visit the ones you’re interested in. Ask to speak to the manager or GM (General Manager), introduce yourself, explain that you’ll be on break from school from early May to late August and will they need help with the summer rush? Never come to the restaurant during lunch or dinner rush. Anyone who came in when we were zooming around and tried to leave a resume got laughed at and their resume was thrown away! Arrive around 2pm or 3pm, or 5pm – after lunch, and before dinner. Keep the conversation brief. Hand out a business card with all the information written on it (“Rose Lastname, could hostess mid-May to late August, senior at Scripps College, (123) 555-4444”). Call the restaurant – again, between lunch and dinner – a couple of weeks before summer break starts and check in with them (“Hi, I’m Rose, I spoke with Manager’s Name in mid-December, and was told to call back a couple of weeks before I returned to Hometown. I wanted to check and see whether you’re still accepting applications for summer staff?”). If they’re accepting applications, send over a resume and emphasize any sort of teamwork/diplomacy experience you have if you get an interview. I was a tour guide, and the manager who hired me loved that because it showed that I know how to work with many different types of people.

If you get an interview, dress professionally. There have been some excellent Beyond the Elms blog posts about this – but always assume professional dress, regardless of the restaurant’s level of dressiness. If you paint your nails, paint them a subtle color, and take out piercings that aren’t in your earlobes. My boss didn’t even let servers have a second ear piercing! This is incredibly variant on the type of restaurant, and mine certainly was on the more conservative end for dress and clientele, but you’ll always leave a positive impression if you’re dressed up even if you’re the only dressy one there. They’ll tell you about the uniform once you get the job.

Good luck on the applications! And as for dealing with the customers… well, that’s a whole different blog post.

Life Lessons & Lobster

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As it gets time to frantically apply to every possible internship and summer program, I want to take a moment and acknowledge everyone who – by choice, by necessity, by both – will be working in the service industry this summer. I worked as a hostess at a corporate, popular seafood restaurant the summer after my first year, and what I learned there will stick with me for life. Thanks to friends A and E, who augmented this with their excellent suggestions. Sadly, people in the real world aren’t always reasonable, thoughtful, or interested in hearing your side of the story. Pull up a chair, everyone, and let us impart our wisdom.

Multitasking. It was common, at my corporate seafood restaurant – hereafter shortened to CC – to have a manager stroll up, request that something be done immediately, and stroll away, completely ignoring the fact that I was busy doing something another manager had commanded mere moments ago. Too many cooks, all that broth, you know the story. The first time this happened, I tried to explain how I was in the midst of something Manager X had requested, and could they perhaps ask someone else? Manager Y looked at me blankly and I could sense they were forming a pretty negative opinion of me – What a shirker! Tries to worm out of anything I ask of her! The next time this happened, I was prepared. I thanked Manager Y, said I would deal with their request as soon as I finished what Manager X had asked of me, and rushed off busily. Both tasks were soon completed and Manager Y was pleased that she didn’t have to deal with a long-winded explanation. Moral of the story: don’t explain every side of the story. Acknowledge the request, note that you’ll get on it as soon as the job at hand is complete, and move on.

Common courtesy. It’s unfortunate that this even needs to be a topic, but such is life. Things I learned from working at CC: “Please” isn’t said half as often as it should be. People assume hosts and servers are uneducated and therefore have no other job prospects. People assume that the poorly-cooked dish is the fault of the busperson or the host. I promise, if you complain to the busperson, they will apologize, whisk the plate away, and laugh about you with everyone in the kitchen. If the problem is with the food, don’t take it out on the server. Let them know you’re unhappy without acting as if it’s their fault. I guess this bullet point is less about how to work in service and more about how to be a human being, but – again, such is life. This goes both ways – a customer may be behaving badly, but they may be having an awful day. Give them the benefit of the doubt, kill them with kindness (it’s funny how disarmed people can be when they expect something else and you smile sweetly instead), and remember that all this will come in handy when you write your memoirs.

It’s the little things. There were so many days I came to work peppy and cheerful, only to deal with unpleasant customers or angry managers and find my mood taking a turn for the worst. I went from being a cheerful hostess to one who treated interactions with customers as perfunctory and impersonal. One day I was feeling horrible and didn’t want to deal with anyone. A couple came in to celebrate an anniversary, and I realized that my bad mood and the rude actions of previous customers shouldn’t affect this couple’s happy evening. I did my best to make sure they had a great time, and the smallest things – a comp card for a free dessert, tipping their server off so he could offer them his best wishes, making sure they got a table with a nice view – made them very happy and cheered me up in the process. Think of it as being a benevolent secret elf. They may not realize that you’re the one making their experience better, but you know it! That good feeling will stick with you. The smallest things – a smile, or asking them how their dinner was and genuinely waiting to hear the answer – can mean so much. Likewise, if a family is having a heated discussion or a solo customer wants a quiet table for a meal and a book, it’s often better to remove yourself quickly and not force conversation.

In conclusion: It’s not the most glamorous job, and sometimes it’s hard to deal with customers who have no interest in you or your life and assume you were born to deal with their whining. But! I saved up for an amazing adventure abroad with the help of my summer job at CC, I got my foot in the door in the restaurant industry of my hometown, and I was able to secure a job at a bar in Germany because they liked that I had restaurant experience. Go forth and apply! (And for those who absolutely need an internship because the rest of their college career depends on it – I was able to balance this job with a part-time academic thing. It’s totally doable.)

Everyone should work in service, regardless of whether they need to make their own money or not. It makes you a human being, and on the bad days – remember, it’s all grist for the mill. Enjoy!

 

Lessons Learned from Halloween

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What’s the scariest story you’ve ever heard? I’ve got one for you: There once was a senior at Scripps who got a phone call informing her that her 30-page lit review for thesis was due in less than a month. The review had to be written in French. The review was not even started. And – the call was coming from inside the house!

Halloween is a great time for scary stories, creative costumes, and tasty treats. Thinking back on Halloweens past, I’ve come to the realization that they may have taught me more than when to hit up the fancy houses (right before they turn in for the night – they will offload all their candy on you) and which candies to completely ignore (I don’t know anybody who’s ever eaten and enjoyed a fruit-flavored Tootsie Roll). Dim the lights, pull up a chair, and get ready for me to drop some knowledge. Lifeskills imparted by Halloween: it’s all right here, right now, on Beyond the Elms.

Negotiation. My best friend and I would convene, exhausted, in my living room after a night pounding the pavement in search of sweets. Dumping out our bags, we’d proceed to sort and organize our candy – by type, by flavor, by size. My dad would crack his jokes about me having a type-A personality. My friend would get tired of my meticulous organizing. Just when everyone was getting tired, I’d finish sorting and the most important part of the night could begin: negotiation and bartering. We’d scan our piles, separate out the candies we didn’t like, and begin figuring out which should be traded for what. Turns out my practice convincing my friend that my one mini Snickers was worth three rolls of Smarties had applications beyond did more than make my teeth buzz: it gave me the confidence to identify what I wanted and negotiate for it. Negotiation is key when discussing tasks, job expectations, and potential salaries.

Compromise. If one frozen Three Musketeers bar is delicious, then ten must be even better. Right? Eight-year-old Rose definitely thought so. My parents, on the other hand, did not want to have to deal with a sugar-charged child and definitely didn’t want our dentist to get upset! They set a limit on the candy I could eat, I challenged it, and we finally arrived at a number we agreed on. Compromise is necessary in everything: with a roommate whose habits may not mirror yours, when you have a mountain of homework and not enough time, when you’re offered a great job with a salary you don’t love. The art of finding that balance – overlooking the messy clothes as long as your roomie vacuums, accepting that you’ll just have to skim the reading if you’re going to have time to work on your problem set, agreeing to the great job and discussing a salary you and your employer are comfortable with. It’s not always the perfect situation, but compromise is necessary to get along peacefully with your coworkers, teammates, roommates, friends, and fellow human beings.

Time management. I grew up in a gray city, and it’s cold by the time Halloween rolls around. It gets down to the low 40s at night, and some costumes just don’t make sense with a big coat on top of them. To top that off, the city didn’t seem to feel it was necessary to illuminate the street lights before about 1am. It didn’t help that my street was full of scary older kids and ended in a cemetery! Each Halloween afternoon my friends and I got together and made a plan of which streets to visit, in what order, to maximize our candy haul before the sun went down, the lights went out, and the air got cold and spooky. We accounted for travel time, unexpected diversions (neighborhood cats, sighting friends, needing to stop and explain our costumes at each house), and necessary breaks (there’s a direct link between difficulty of costume removal and the frequency of the need to pee). We made sure to finish our trick-or-treating on one very fancy street, where we were rewarded with half a grocery bag worth of full-sized candy bars (and a story to dine out on for days at school). Planning out the most optimal trick-or-treat has helped me manage my time in college, at work, when I’m studying, and every time I visit a new city.

“Halloween” is practically synonymous with “Life skill building”! Well, maybe not yet. What are some skills you learned from Halloweens gone by?

Life After Scripps

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When the posters for Life After Scripps went up around campus, I did a double take. Every year I promised myself I’d get to at least one event and never really managed to. This year, on the other side of my time abroad, my life after Scripps is practically upon me. I decided to attend the Speed Networking Dinner so I could practice and get plenty of feedback. Plus, it was a free meal. Can’t say no to that!

Here are the tips I got from the dinner:

1) Remember how amazing you are, and don’t be afraid to talk yourself up. Imagine that you’re stuck in an elevator with someone, and you have the length of the ride to make a case for how hire-able/unique/interesting you are. Condense your story into 30-45 seconds and remember to speak with confidence. Did you do some amazing research this summer? Intern somewhere incredible? Found a company? Learn a new language? Now’s the time to bring it up.

2) You’ve done some amazing stuff. How does it inform what you plan to do in the future? Potential employers want to hear how you plan to use the skills and experience you’ve acquired. Did an internship lead to a grad school idea? Did learning a language reveal a love of teaching? Did your time abroad help you realize that you want to stay in the US? Tie in your skills with future plans – it shows that you have an eye to future careers and experience.

3) Ask questions of your networking partner. Points if you know enough about where they work to ask a question tailored specifically to the organization. If you don’t, that’s fine – just don’t ask them what (company name) does. Ask how they ended up where they are, or what they love most about what they do, or what they studied in college – it can be fascinating to learn that the wine broker you’re speaking with was a marine biology major in college (hey, dad!).

If you’re not sure what to put in your elevator speech, ask your friends/professors/mentors about things that stand out about you. They often see things you may overlook. Practice your speech and be able to deliver it confidently at the drop of a hat. You never know – the person ahead of you at the coffee shop or sitting next to you on the train may be working in your dream profession!