PERSPECTIVES
Zeynab Day, Editor
The Eastern Progress | www.easternprogress.com
Thursday, May 1, 2014
A6
Spend your summer wisely for future benefits It’s that time of year again. In just a week, fi nal exams will be over and most of the students will go home. While most look at summer as a time to relax or save money, it’s also an important time and opportunity for growing, both personally and professionally. The summer vacation, should students opt for taking a break instead of slogging through summer classes, isn’t really about taking a break. It is an opportunity to be productive—to have a job and make some money. But it’s also an opportunity to try some new things in the field you’re studying. Not only will it round out your resume, but it also gives you a chance to discover what you like and don’t like about yourself or your current major. If you decide that what you are doing isn’t for you it’s is not necessarily a bad thing. It is better you learn that now, before you’ve committed several more years of college to something that might not be for you. If you do take a job, keep a few things in mind. First, it’s easy to get trapped in the high school mindset, where all you’re after is a job that provides you with money. There’s more to it than that now. Sure, you want the job that provides the best wage you can get, but there’s also something else to consider: the opportunity costs. Opportunity costs are the idea that you consider the alternatives to what you want to do to get a bigger picture of the “relative value” of something. Let’s say you’re tasked with buying clothes for interviewing for an internship or summer job. You think you have a chance at the job and you really want to wow your prospective employer with how professional you are. But you only have $100 to get dressed head-to-toe. Depending on your gender, this can be a bit more difficult. You may have some elements of the outfit on hand, but they don’t match with the affordable options on your local department store’s clearance racks. So what do you do? Spend all $100 on a brand new matching outfit or spend $80 on a new shirt and tie and go to thrift shopping for new slacks? What is that $20 worth to you at that time? The same idea applies to opportunities you have during the summer. Sure, you might make more money going back to your regular restaurant job at Cracker Barrel, Logan’s or Buffalo Wild Wings, but you give up the opportunity to work an entry-level job in your profession, such as a freelance
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correspondent for your community newspaper. It pays less, or it may not even pay at all, but if you don’t take the entry-level job you miss the opportunity to get your foot in the door. Isn’t the wiser decision to forgo the restaurant job now, take the entry-level career job and make more money in the future through earning potential? That’s the question every student has to think about and make a decision on when it comes to summer jobs. If you end up working in a field you’re studying and you enjoy it that can also open up opportunities once the campus becomes lively again in the fall. You could have the ability to use what you learned during the summer to benefit not just the campus, but also the community of Richmond.
The city is billed as having more than 31,000 residents, but nearly 5,000 are added through students staying in the dorms, so the demand for resources and workers grows on the city. Unless you grew up in an urban area, I’m sure Richmond has more opportunities while you’re here in college than you would have at home. If you reach your senior year and graduate with a high GPA, while working a 20 to 30 hour part-time job in the career field for your major, it really shows that you have a good ability to multitask and you have more than just a high GPA alone. Ultimately, opportunity costs but it could provide a payout in your future. Don’t waste your summer, get out, experience life.
Graduation adventure worth long, winding path Wesley Robinson Editor
A bachelor’s degree is supposed to take four years, sometimes five to complete. My college career has been like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book spanning 11 years of real-time. You could read it once through and get the highlights pretty quickly if you pick the right path, or you can choose a more drawn out path, take a few risks, experience a few setbacks and have to start the story all over again. I chose the longer, more expansive adventure. When I started college at the University of Kentucky in 2003, I didn’t really want to go to school, but I didn’t have any other options. The military seemed like a bad idea for a free-thinker who didn’t like to listen, mom’s house wasn’t simply a viable option and the idea of more school seemed like a chore—especially considering I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be something like a David E. Kelley character on The Practice. That idea was short-lived after my writing skills were atomic bombed in English classes. I couldn’t quit. I was told I had to major in something,
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so I chose Spanish because I had been studying the language and culture in some fashion since the summer between fifth and sixth grade after taking an extracurricular course taught by a Panamanian neighbor in my hometown of Tacoma, Wash. That academic plan didn’t work out too well either because the commitment to learning another language becomes extremely difficult after taking 300-level courses dedicated to reading and writing and not having an opportunity to be immersed in the language through studies abroad, but I pressed on mostly in vain. At the same time I was digging a dubious academic hole with a foreign language and a wayward adventure, I discovered journalism. I’ve always been interested in the newspapers, mostly the sports section, but I had developed a love for learning and sharing stories. Perhaps it runs in the family. My uncle, a longtime editor within the Gannett network has always been someone I admired and his sister, my mom, was a bit of a journalist in her past, according to her transcripts buried amongst other keepsakes in her Louisville basement. I found myself at one of my major crossroads after the fourth time I took time off school to figure out what I was doing. I had figured out school. I learned how to network, volunteer, learn outside of the classroom and how to gain real meaningful experience through the university structure. I had racked up quite a bit of student debt and essentially proven I wasn’t a good
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scholar. I had crapped out on the college gamble, at least at UK. Just before I was laid off at my last fulltime job, my boss told me that I had the potential to do her job and higher if I applied myself and if that was what I wanted to do. She echoed the same words as she explained the company’s layoff policy and whether or not I wanted to stay on in a menial role until more prospects opened up, or if I wanted to pursue other opportunities including finishing a degree. I choose school and I decided to transfer to Eastern. It’s cliché to say it was the best decision of my life, but to this point, I can’t think of anything more impactful. To me Eastern has been finishing school… obviously not in the traditional sense of the term, but in the sense that it helped me complete my collegiate experience. Literally, I will finish here. Figuratively, this university has been the culmination point of my learning experiences to this point in life. I came here looking to get a degree and get out. Show up. Go to class. Get good grades. Earn a degree and move on. I’m writing this farewell as the editor of the newspaper, so it’s safe to say I got involved a little bit. When I transferred to Eastern I had a simple goal. I wanted to graduate before my little sister. That may not seem like a big task, but when I started college, she was in elementary school. When I walk across
the stage May 10, I’ll have beat her by just one year, but I achieved my goal, because I didn’t quit and it is thanks to people pushing me in ways I cannot begin to repay. Getting through college has been a collective experience that so many people have impacted. So many people have left an important mark on my story I can’t begin to name them all. I don’t have the economy of words to describe just how much of a journey this has been, but to put it into perspective, the guy who couldn’t cut it at the Interior Journal in Stanford is headed off to try his hand at the Washington Post. Doesn’t make sense, does it? At times I’ve wanted to quit, I was in complete despair, but people have given me a hand up and sometimes had more confidence in me that I’ve had in myself. This adventure has been worth choosing because of kindness, compassion and understanding from family, friends and mentors. Whether it’s the loving text I get every Sunday morning when I’m dreading the fact that I’m again working with no days off or the warm embraces I receive when I run into someone who has seen my transformation from graphic T-shirts and fitted caps to now, I value it all more than words can describe. When I didn’t have the strength to turn the page, you helped and that means everything. Wesley Robinson is a journalism senior. Email wesley_robinson28@mymail.eku. edu.
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