Please write a ~500 word piece (or upload a reflection in another medium, such as video) on your first meeting with either your campus employment supervisor or the course instructor. If the former, they should have asked you the following questions:
- What are you hoping to learn from this experience?
- How do you see this work as complementing your academic, extracurricular, or career interests?
- What is the best way to give you feedback and support you to ensure your success in this role?
- Of the six Ideals into Practice competencies, which do you feel play to your strengths or past experiences, and which do you feel need more development?
Below are paraphrased responses from my meeting with Ikram Haque (ihaque@wesleyan.edu), my employer at Summerfields on the Wesleyan University Campus:
- I’m hoping to find some meaning in my work experience at Summerfields; there, I spend a few hours a week working basic tasks such as stock upkeep, wiping tables, and greeting customers alongside my coworkers. I hope, through CSPL405, to make these tasks more than “basic” by identifying the ways they might connect to the decision-making process about my career and bring insight into the schoolwork I’m doing now as I work towards my career.
- I’m very interested in systems of co-operation, and working at Summerfields has given me a chance to explore one in a comfortable setting. Unlike academia, wherein the teachers can embody, at times, a foreboding presence fit for their role in educating us on a great amount of material in a little amount of time, my employers at Summerfields are much more relaxed about conditions of work, yet firm in their expectations of your work. They want the “basic work” to be done, but when I wipe the tables wrong or cause a miscommunication between workers, the consequence are much less dire– I’d still need to learn from my mistake, but failure wouldn’t throw me behind in coursework or stunt my potential to understand future attempts at wiping tables. In this way, Summerfields provides me the opportunity to reflect on co-operative work experiences that might help for whatever future career I’m leaning towards, but does it in an environment much less taxing and definite than the classroom.
- I could learn a great deal from your prolonged edition of my own work troubles. For instance, a manager before me offered some help– seeing I was sorely lacking in the facilities needed to make and maintain proper organization– by bringing to my attention his own acclimation in a field where organization is do-or-die. He gave a story to me after I had clocked out of my shift about how one accidentally doubled order, if it were a mistake on one of the especially expensive items, could cost the facility enough to take desserts off the menu for a week, disrupting the weekly flow. This effort, a casual one beyond the scope of work hours or even Summerfields-specific work policy, contributed to a life-long lesson about organization, but also to my idea of employer-employee relationships. I appreciate when you address the life I have and might have beyond the workplace, as it often provides a powerful contextualization of tasks that would otherwise be the “basic” work of wiping tables and checking stock.
- I feel as if creativity has had an important role in my life, and as such I’ve cultivated creative habits and hobbies to build on in a professional setting. I have not, though, learned how to communicate that creativity yet. Wether it’s inappropriately informal language or a failure to articulate a good idea in an equally good expression, communication is something I want to improve on, greatly, though my experience at Summerfields and beyond.
