Category Archives: Christie

Early Bird Gets The Worm

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Writing is really hard for me. Edits on edits on edits and I still rarely get it right. Coming from an English major and blogger, this probably alarms most of you, but I think writing naturally is and should be hard for most people. There are so many ways to word a simple feeling or thought. A slight variation in punctuation or word choice can completely change the meaning of a sentence. So how will you ever know if you’ve clearly articulated what you meant? And how will you ever know how your readers interpret your writing? As writers (which I believe we all are) I don’t suppose we will ever know. We can only try our best to be honest and sincere.

Writing is difficult! Thus, I’m apprehensive at the thought of asking someone else to write for me, but I did just that last weekend. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’m starting to apply for summer jobs/internships and most applications require a written letter of recommendation. I nervously rattled off a 346-word email to a former high school teacher requesting a copy of the letter of recommendation she wrote for me my senior year. I don’t know why I wrote so much, but I have a feeling it was my conscience’s way of guilt tripping me.

An email is no way to request a letter of recommendation. In an ideal situation, you and your recommender would discuss the matter over a steaming cup of tea. Norah Jones would be playing while you spent a healthy chunk of time discussing the nature of the job/internship, the required components and format of the letter, the looming dateline of doom, etc. I did not have any of those luxuries because my application was due in about a week. (I promise to give more notice next time, future recommenders!)

I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to get a quality letter of recommendation until last weekend. Before I flirted with the idea of asking one of my current professors or supervisors, but I came to the conclusion that such a request would be a huge burden on anyone who has only known me for, at the most, a semester. Certainly you can’t know a person after a few months. Luckily, an understanding mentor assured me that my troubles were not unique to me: most first year students are preoccupied with adjusting to college life and, consequently, have yet to have the opportunity to foster a terribly large slew of meaningful relationships. She urged me to ask one my former teachers or coaches from high school, who have known me for a significantly longer period of time.

I was very fortunate to receive a reply from my recommender only two short days after I sent the email. She happily obliged to my inconvenient request and assured me that my letter was in the post and should arrive within the next few days. What a saint! And what a lesson learned: while we may be willing to pull all-nighters to crank out job/internship applications, others such as our recommenders have more pressing priorities.It is our responsibility to notify those who we ask favors of in advance. For those readers who are also filling out applications, be sure to stay on top of everything! The early bird gets the worm. And if you don’t like worms, the deal also comes with a couple extra hours of sleep.

Mondays Are Good

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I like Mondays this semester. The pace is perfect – slow and easy in the morning, then there’s a tiny pickup in the afternoon, and then it all winds down nicely in the evening. Mondays are better than Tuesdays or Thursdays because there are fewer gaps in my schedule. I hate having one or two hour blocks of nothing between classes. They’re too short to get any real work done… but long enough that I know better than to waste it on Facebook. Mondays are also better than Wednesdays. Although I have the same classes on both days, they’re different because I don’t get to tutor my little seventh grade munchkin on Wednesdays. I wish every day was a Monday. Huzzah!

 

6:00am-9:00am Sallie Tiernan Field House

The day starts at 5:45am for me (I’m kind of a morning person). I like my job at the Field House. It’s a pretty sweet deal. And the music you hear at the pool? Yeah, we at the front desk take care of that too. Sorry if you don’t like Ellie Goulding. You’ll never have a job quite like your college work-study job. Your boss is a saint, your co-workers are actually your friends, and the patrons aka your classmates are always forgiving and patient. Have a great day and sorry for occasionally swiping your card backwards!

9:00am-12:00pm Clark Humanities Museum

People think I’m so cool when they find out I’m a museum assistant. This is probably because they think I guide tours or decode ancient hieroglyphics on the job. The truth is my job is pretty cool, but I generally don’t do either of those things. Sometimes, I’m more like the museum secretary. I sit at Karen’s desk, answer calls, and shuffle papers. Other times I do more arbitrary tasks. Do you know how to polish silver? I didn’t know until last week. I spent approximately six hours cleaning and polishing French porcelain and silverware for a private event this weekend (see my handiwork below). Am I qualified to run a vintage boutique yet?

12:00pm-1:10pm British Literature / 1:15pm-3:45pm Drawing

When I was younger, my favorite subjects in school were English and Art. As I grew older, I fell out of the habit of writing and drawing in my free time. I moved three times during middle school and, quite frankly, I was more preoccupied with fitting in and making friends than pursuing something that “wasn’t going to get you anywhere”. I just now got back into writing and drawing regularly. Sometimes, when I frown at the glaring comma splices on my Mac screen, when I sigh at the distorted charcoal lines on my paper, I wonder if things would be different if I hadn’t stopped. Sometimes, this makes me sad. Sure, art is not “useful” like business or engineering or medicine. The dean of students in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man once said, “We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts.” I don’t like the useful arts. I’m not very good that them either (I have a feeling these two things are correlated). But I like the liberal arts. In high school, I learned to love history and politics. In college, I rekindled my love for literature and art. This semester, I’m taking a sociology class at Pitzer and I like that too. I wonder what else I never knew I couldn’t live without. Good thing I have four more years to find out.

4:00pm-5:00pm Tutoring

Have you ever tutored a kid one-on-one before? If you haven’t, you should. You’ll teach him a thing or two, but you’ll probably learn more from him. Kids are amazing because they’re not jaded or worn down by the world yet. After a few tutoring sessions, even without being prompted, they’ll start opening up to you. They’ll tell you about their plans to travel the world, build rockets, and join the Chilean football team. And you can’t tell them they can’t because they’ll tell you that they’ll prove you wrong. Kids remind us that we need to stay passionate about what we believe in and continue fighting the odds. Cheers to that.

Summer Plans

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I don’t want to be home for the summer. It’s not that I have a problem with living at home with either of my parents. I love them and we have a wonderful relationship. But I don’t want to be home for the summer. I want to experience something new and exciting and a little scary too. I could nurse disabled senior citizens in upstate New York. There’s a program for that. I could tutor low-income high school students in Massachusetts. There’s a program for that. Perhaps the problem here isn’t what programs are available, but what programs I can get into.

My pickings are slim and I’m pick-pick-picky. As a first year college student I know I can’t be, but I am! I want to do work that is different from what I would be doing at a typical nine to five. If I can, I want to do something meaningful. I would love to help write grants for a nonprofit organization. And I would just die if I could teach English abroad. Such opportunities usually don’t provide an hourly wage per say, but have a weekly stipend that is enough to cover room and board. And that’s enough. I just need enough. The program’s location doesn’t have to be exotic but, as I mentioned before, it can’t be local. I also don’t want to be stranded somewhere awful for the sake of experiencing it. Home, but not home… sounds like Scripps College.

Thus, I decided last week to apply to be a Peer Mentor (Scripps College New Student Program) and Facilitator (Scripps College Academy). Both are not full summer programs, as they only require me to be on campus a few weeks in either August or June respectively, but their applications will ease me into my search process. Both got me thinking, what knowledge and experiences have I to share with others? More specifically, what have I to share with students who will soon undergo the uneasy transition from high school to college? It’s strange, because I still consider myself to be going through the transition. I still have trouble finding the ATM on the Smith Campus Center, so I walk once a week to Bank of America in the Village (it’s a great excuse to skip the gym).

Like most Scripps students, I have plenty of leadership experience. In high school, I was a member of the student government and cheerleading team for three years. During the third year, I was co-captain. But an experienced leader doesn’t necessarily make a good leader. I don’t have a lot of the answers. It was hard for me to respond to some of the Peer Mentor application’s hypothetical scenarios. I’m not sure what to tell a mentee if she has problems with her roommate or misses home. My relationship with my current roommate has never been problematic. I also miss home sometimes and understand that feelings of homesickness ebb and flow. You can’t really do anything to alleviate something so natural. Some days are better than others. Even now as I write this blog, I feel a trepidation building up.

Many programs, including the ones I’m applying for, also require letters of recommendation. While the Peer Mentor application does not require a written letter of recommendation, the SCA Facilitator application does. It must be written by an individual who has known me for a significant period of time. Who knows me better than my high school advisors, coaches, and teachers? But they seem to exist in an alternate universe far, far away now. I wonder if they still have copies of the letters they wrote for me last year. Is it awkward to ask for them? Is it perhaps even rude to ask after being out of touch for almost a year?

I don’t know what I’m doing this summer. The trepidation is new and exciting and little scary, too.

Be Fabulous

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I’m having a serious first world problem today: I don’t know what to wear. Because I generally work four to five days a week, my “school clothes” must also function as my “work clothes”. Of course, it’s not that I’m expected to uphold a stringent dress code at any of my workplaces, but it’s important to exercise some common sense. For instance, when I give campus tours Thursday afternoons, I make an effort to wear comfortable walking shoes. On the other hand, when I work the morning shift at the Sallie Tiernan Field House, I simply wear my staff t-shirt and pack clothes to change into.

I find that dress codes at most workplaces are becoming more casual, especially in California, which is known to be laidback and relaxed. I know many young professionals who dress business casual on most days or at least on Fridays. But what is “business casual”? Does that mean I can ditch the sheer tights? Or even better, does that mean can I just wear jeans to work? The workplace is definitely not where you should test-drive the newest avant garde fashions, but even as professionals, we cannot help wanting to maintain our individuality.

Every girl knows the basics: close-toed shoes, tame makeup, and absolutely no plunging necklines. Nevertheless, there are some grey areas we must learn to navigate. Is this dress too short? Is my eyeliner drawn on too thickly? Situations such as these are when we most need to exercise good judgment. What may be appropriate at Barney & Co. may be inappropriate at Muppets, Teletubbies, & Sesame Street. The bottom line is that our coworkers may perceive something we feel comfortable in as tasteless. Thus, I adhere to six very uncomplicated principles:

  1. Keep it classy. Pretend your boss has your grandmother’s sensibilities. This means you will swap the bedazzled UGGS for a pair of elegant black heels. Or at least I hope you will.
  2. When in doubt, chicken out. Maybe today is a cutout dress kind of day. But most likely, it is not.
  3. I like tights. This is just a random fact about me. It is always appropriate to wear tights. It’s Friday, go crazy! Pair a simple black dress with merlot tights. Oh em gee, you totally look South Market!
  4. Put the Jeffrey Campbells down. Wear flats. If you’re a college student like me, you’re probably working at the service level. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It just means you will probably be on your feet most of the day.
  5. If competitive cheerleading taught me anything, it’s BOBBY PINS + HAIRSPRAY = YES. Even if you’re just wearing your hair in a ponytail, you will look that much more put together.
  6. “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” – Coco Chanel.

Now go be fabulous! P.S. I start a new job as an assistant at the Clark Humanities Museum today. How do I look?

Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman

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It’s so weird being eighteen. You’re at an age when you’re not a girl, not yet a woman. Cue Britney Spears.

Okay, so maybe I’m being a little melodramatic. But I’m truly at a weird point in my “professional” life, whatever that means. The reality is, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, I feel like I don’t have access to the same opportunities as my peers who are upperclassmen. As a legal adult, I’m expected to uphold a decent job… Yet the jobs I qualify for seem to include barista, sales associate, and not much in between. So much for that dream job at Got It Made L.L.P…. for now.

It’s no small secret that being a (budding) young professional in 2012 is hard. I don’t know much about business or the economy or the job market, but I’m aware that things are different from the way they were twenty years ago. You don’t need to be a Wall Street Journal subscriber to know that people are retiring later and job are harder to come by. This is especially true for younger and thus less qualified job applicants such as myself.

I recently applied for Maximum Impact 2012, Deloitte’s Alternative Spring Break. It is a community service program sponsored by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu USA L.L.P. and the United Way of America. Deloitte’s website more formally describes it as…

… a week-long, expenses-paid trip to Atlanta, GA, where we’ll be supporting students in at-risk communities inside and outside the classroom. Also, you’ll be working side by side with professionals and recruiters from Deloitte who can offer an inside look into life in professional services. And after a day spent working together, there will be plenty of opportunity for fun, including dinners, outings and other team-building activities.

Well, I think that beats watching Doctor Who reruns on BBC for a week. I’m still young and idealistic, so I believe that pro bono (or for the public good) work is best way to manifest one’s professional talents. My desire to contribute and give back to the community drives my career aspirations. I couldn’t pass up an opportunity like Maximum Impact 2012, so I applied for the program in late January, knowing that I probably wouldn’t get one of 50 – 55 available spots. But I had to at least try! Like I said, it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up. And who knows… If I keep trying, I might get lucky one of these days (I will keep you guys posted)!

I’m not exactly sure what I want to do with my life, but the bottom line is that I want to do good. Actually, I want to do a lot of good! Some typical career-related questions confuse me, like “How would you describe yourself?”. My response better answers “What motivates you?”.

I’m a lot of things. I’m a student. I’m a blogger. I’m a fat cat lover, a good book reader, and a green tea drinker. And I plan to use my talents to do good. Actually, a lot of good.