The first job I had after finishing my last medical school exam was scrubbing out the gluey bottoms of gnocchi cooking pots. My station was a make-shift sink at the back of a pop-up restaurant, and I was earning some money to help pay off university debts before my clinical internship started a few months later. Hands red raw I learned some valuable lessons doing that work - the importance of the right tool for the job (steel wool) and relishing any small joys that work can bring (in this case bowls of fresh homemade pasta at the end of a shift).
Whenever I turn to work on my narrative cv – a document I find excruciatingly difficult to write – it often occurs to me that there is no room for this job amidst the story of my academic achievements. There is also no room for my jobs which required ill-fitting primary-coloured polo shirts (U.S. conglomerates not to be named), whether it was dishing out boxes of chicken cooked in special herbs and spices, making tasteless coffee or renting out family-friendly VHS cassettes. Yet the lessons I learned in these places! Quickly assess the hidden needs of the customer, invaluable in teaching; the power of the ‘suggestive sell’, critical in grant writing; and from the video store, how to use my brain and not Google to answer a nagging question.
As secretarial help I learned how to organise files and to touch type quickly. As a doctor, a job which does occasionally appear in my now social science orientated CV, I learned to meet deadlines, because others rely on that, as well as the necessity of a good handover.
I have the privilege to look back at these past jobs now fondly, or at least humorously. Not everyone can. They don’t have much of a place in academic culture today though and I wonder if we are poorer for it. We are asked to offer progressive and impressive narratives from our university careers when some of the most important life lessons which help us in positions of leadership, in the classroom and in research, are in fact learned elsewhere.
Anna Harris, associate professor department of Society Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.