What are the Best Jobs for College Students?
Dear Digital Student,
I’m an incoming college freshman about to start school in the fall. I’m holding my own and am looking for ways to make money. What are some reasonable jobs for college students?
Sincerely,
Will work for food
Dear incoming freshman,
First of all, congratulations on your acceptances to school! There are several jobs you can look for once you get on campus. Some of the best jobs don’t require too much work, and they will make you some easy money. Here are a list of my favorites that don’t require you to venture far from campus.
Desk Attendant: Some schools allow student security guards to watch students enter and leave dorms and other campus buildings. Depending on the job description, you may have to sign guests in and out or disallow non-residents entirely. During the hours that aren’t that busy, you can even do your homework. It’s also a great way to meet new people.
Resident Assistant: This probably isn’t an option for an incoming freshman, but an RA usually gets offered free housing in return for leading a group of students residing in the same dorm (usually assigned per floor or per building). Resident assistants get pretty sweet digs and are required to hold monthly meetings with their residents. They also enforce the rules and offer a helping hand to students looking for guidance.
Babysitter: Face it, babysitting is a commodity to many working parents and it also pays a lot better per hour than on-campus jobs. Many college work programs have lists filled with parents who are looking for a mature college student to take care of their kids while they go out. And in reality, most of these kids go to bed early, giving you more time for homework.
Library Assistant: The college libraries are begging for students to help take care of book check out, audio/video systems, computer access, and the copy machines. There are a lot of positions and some good experience to be had.
Computer Lab Technician: Computer-savvy students will be happy to know that there are a variety of computer-related positions in on-campus labs and in college dormitories. Labs always need technicians during their open hours to troubleshoot problems with monitors, printers, and other peripherals. Many colleges also offer a “residential network” program, also known as ResNet, where students can get help from fellow students on computer network troubleshooting issues (wired or wireless) at any time of the day. All you need is to make an appointment.
Working alongside your professor: These individuals are also known as Teaching Assistants and get some incredible exposure on specific areas of study. You’ll often hold office hours, grade papers, and offer academic guidance on a specific course. You’ll also establish a relationship with a professor, which can open some huge doors for you. If anything, this is the job you want to put on your resume, especially if you’re headed up the graduate school route.
Internships: The other route is to take a paid internship in an area that you are interested in pursuing post-graduation. This is also a great way to build experience and pad your resume. Internships are a great option for financial aid and give you hands-on experience in a field — often well before your peers.
What jobs have you held during college?
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
The financial aid and job consoling offices on campus will have good jobs available. Be careful not to take too many hours because it will cut into your study time. That’s why the Desk Attendant job is great (I did it.)
Watch the internships. They pay little or NO money in relation to the responsibilities that come with the job. So know what you are getting into.
I’ve put a link to this blog at http://avenuestosuccessnotes.typepad.com/ so that others can benefit from this site.
April 12th, 2008 at 5:24 am
If these jobs were numbered, I would place Internships at the top of the list - they might all pay as much as you like, but you can find good ones out there. The experience you gain is invaluable anyways. If you can afford to do it (or even volunteer somewhere in a related field), you should.
April 12th, 2008 at 6:22 am
You can always take a look at the student’s newspaper and radio. I’m the computer technician of my varsity’s student newspaper, and this is a pretty good job.
The problem with most of the campus job: they don’t pay a lot. You can always look on the side, outside of the cheap jobs (video rental, fast food, etc.) you can find some startups needing everning workers.
April 12th, 2008 at 6:40 am
My best job job in college was working at a bank. Consider the benefits:
1- Great hours. I never had to work late and only half a day Saturday, never Sunday.
2- The pay was much better than most college jobs. I started out $4.50 above minimum wage at the time.
3- It helped me a lot when I went job hunting. It is considered a professional job and is shows you can work in a professional environment. It was well respected on my resume.
Negative - I HAD TO WEAR A TIE.
April 12th, 2008 at 6:41 am
I think it depends on what value you hold in a job. Is it to get money now or to set you up for something in the future? A teacher’s assistant or a lab assistant are great jobs to set up for graduate research gigs, med school or the private research sector. They don’t pay much more than a dollar or two an hour more than the cheap-o jobs. If you stick with them, you can often get good raises. Just beware your lab running out of funding. I worked full time with a couple other students at a lab a couple summers ago, and the next summer, they couldn’t hire anyone full time.
If you’re looking for money to pay for school, the jobs you’ll want are probably not going to allow you much time to study. Babysitting is a great option if you’re a woman, it seems. My sister makes a lot of change doing that just once or so a week.
On my campus, the worst paid and most readily available jobs are food service, whether ON campus or just off it. The best paying and most coveted job seemed to be law library attendant. You had to wait for someone to graduate or die to get them. They’re easy and pay really well. You usually have to reshelve, look up journal articles and cases and help people find things.
I did food service, but if I could, I’d go back and do what I do now. I’m a nursing assistant at the university’s hospital. I make a fantastic hourly wage, I’m insured, I get vacation time and it only took a two-month community college class for me to be qualified. The bonus is that I’m getting health care experience for grad school.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:17 am
I also agree that hospitality jobs are best. In college, I started off as a busser at a high end restaurant and made 4-something/hour + tips. It ended up being between $18 and $20/hour. I only worked 25 hours/week but I wasn’t subsisting on Ramen noodles.
April 12th, 2008 at 8:14 am
work at a grocery store, it is what i do and dang is it easy…
April 12th, 2008 at 8:16 am
TA’ing is a really good job for multiple reasons. I TA’d chemistry for 3 years during college. I made $20/hour (15-20 hrs/ week). It gave me a good grasp of chemistry (one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it) and subsequently scored very highly on the physical sciences section of the MCAT. I also developed a great relationship with the professor which led to a couple research projects and publications with that professor. When it came time to apply to med school, I got a great letter of recommendation from that professor. TA’ing was one of the best decisions I made in undergrad.
April 12th, 2008 at 8:28 am
@Tom - Internship pay varies wildly depending on field. All three of my internships (after sophomore and junior years, and between senior year and grad school) paid nearly as well as an entry-level engineer at the same company. That’s fairly typical in CompSci jobs.
In general, be careful with all these nonsense jobs. Employers are uninterested in sitting at a desk doing homework while pretending to work, they’d rather see you take an extra class and do some useful project than do some useless, makework job. (This is especially true with campus IT techs, usually the height of incompetence.)
April 12th, 2008 at 8:50 am
School Print Center - Peddling portable drives containing student work to and fro……Printing on machines with the word jet on them….HOt!
April 12th, 2008 at 11:06 am
The highest paying jobs when I was in school were the kids who worked for Public Safety driving the shuttle vans around. Crappy part was that you had to work nights to do that.
Personally, I worked in the school’s IT department for 3 years… and with the A/V services department my 4th. They didn’t pay much but it beat not having any money all the time!
Honestly, I’d never work food service. Especially in the dorms. Not worth it IMHO.
p.s. Internships are not all their cracked up to be. Especially since it seems, at least in my industry, they’re still not counted as “real world” experience. (In my industry, interns = getting someone to do the job for free.)
April 12th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I have a really good job being an audio technician at school. the job allows me to be involved in many events, and i get great technical knowledge. Work in the student union, most of the time people who work there want to work with students, and they really enjoy helping you out.
April 12th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Amazon’s outsource network is like an eBay for freelancers - it’s called Mechanical Turk, and let’s you work on a series of tasks, anytime you want.
A while back I wrote a post of Mechanical Turk, and the advantages for college students:
http://tinyurl.com/5wzb6o
April 13th, 2008 at 11:00 am
It’s worth looking at the end game here. One day you will be going for the job all this study has built up to. The difference between the job you want, and the next one down can be quite large, so where you can, step back and ask how this job will look on your resume.
I headhunt people for banks (mostly quants, ie maths/physics/CS/engineer majors), and at that level they often like to see people who can explain complex ideas well, and so teaching can be useful.
http://www.wilmott.com/blogs/dcfc
April 13th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I worked for the Varsity Internship Program last summer–an amazing experience! It’s not for everyone–only people who don’t mind working hard, getting great experience, building their resume, and making a good amount of money. (average first year student makes around $7,000). More info can be found at bestsummerjob.com
April 15th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I was employed all through college and every job I had was awesome in its own way. I recommend students get a variety of jobs through college to get experience in different fields or with different pay scales. I was a CS major, so most of my jobs involved technology, but they all gave me a different perspective, which just added to my learning experience.
My fist job was working for the school’s auditorium. I did everything from setting up and taking down shows for big-name acts, to moving boxes and sweeping floors. The hours were based around events, so I could work as much or as little as my schedule allowed, and there were opportunities (especially for show take-downs) to work as late as 2-3 in the morning. Plus the pay was a bit better than most campus jobs.
My next job was a year and a half working for the Office of Residential Life as a web developer. ORL had its own little IT dept made up of students overseen by a professional. It was much cheaper than a department of professionals and it provided us with an experience very similar to a real IT department. This job was REALLY handy when I went to go find a good internship.
After my time at ORL, I took a semester off school and went to work for an investment company as a Java developer in a 7-month co-op. While taking a semester off to work can be rough on your academics, if you can handle it and you have a plan to finish school. It can be a great opportunity. In my case, they paid very well AND they paid for my apartment while I worked there, so I could save a lot of money for my last year of school.
When I came back to school, I rounded things off working at a computer lab and as a “grader”. Lab work is great work if you like to sit around and play video games all day. It doesn’t pop out to employers as great experience, but it’s easy money and lets you concentrate on your studies. Being a grader was great, too. It is a position like a teacher’s assistantship, but without the “teaching” part. I was given a stack of Java programs written by freshmen every other week and graded them when I had time, returning them to the teacher when I was done. It paid 10 hours a week no matter how much I worked, even though I usually only worked about 3-4 hours a week. Plus I got to learn all about decrypting bad Java, which is very useful in my current job.
When it came to finding a job after school, I already had a resume packed with experience I could apply to many situations, and 2 months before I graduated, I already had offers from 3 different companies to choose from. Not to mention all that work allowed me to graduate college debt-free (which is very uncommon these days). The bottom line is that when it comes to working in college, I recommend it. Find a job with your future in mind, not just the one that pays the best. Ask around in your major, find out where the “smart students” work. Often you’ll find there are some great jobs available you never even knew existed.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:55 am
The best college job I had was being an usher. It was nice because I was working on campus and after the first hour of helping people find their seats I was able to sit outside the auditorium and do homework for two to three hours during the concerts.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I had a few IT related Jobs in College. I did Tech Support for the School of Education, and then was offered a better paying position at the Journalism school as the Sr. Student IT Manager. I made about $13 an hour and taxes were almost nothing since it was a student job at a Public University, which is a nice paycheck for an on campus job! As time went on I was given more and more responsibilities, and it really started effecting my studies. I started working too much and missing some classes because I had to help some professor I had or helping the dean of the school. Finally I quit after it encroached too much on my studies and got a great job on campus interning for Apple.
Bottom line; You’re at school to succeed and do well in your courses. If you need to pick up a job to pay for expenses at School, make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew. Looking back at my experience I would have saved myself alot of stress if I had chosen a job that had a smaller paycheck and less responsibility.