Paying for higher education is one of the most notorious ways to dive into debt. Similar to most of my fellow students also pursuing their masters in the humanities, I persevered through the program by working as a bartender. I quickly learned that the career system was built on experience, but experience was more than difficult to attain without the support of a university, but a university was entirely out of reach without money, and for that abundance of money, someone has to work (as a bartender, for example) as much as possible. Yet, where does that leave time to study and gain the experience the money was supposed to pay for?
Before my masters started, I knew that I wouldn’t have opportunities to leverage school and internships the same way my classmates would — any available time I had was dedicated to bartending for extra cash. I would have to use other skillsets to reach the same platform as my competitors. As hard as I would work, I would never, could never be fully dedicated to an internship or a class. I considered my job the commitment that earned money and supported the roof over my head and food on my plate.
Throughout my education, I pursued various internships, habitually logging significantly more than forty hours a week between both working and interning. Fear settled in as my internships never formulated into jobs. What I lacked in time, I made up for by being the hardest worker. I took the long hours in stride, sacrificing personal time to dedicate one hundred percent of my energies to both my bartending job and my internship.
But universities had deceived me into believing that hard work would make my dreams come into fruition. I was quick to learn hard work is a useless claim in an over-saturated field of driven applicants, all striving toward the same limited goal. I spent the near two years I was in graduate school applying to jobs, pairing my robust education with the internship experience I had gained, school advisors wrongly implying that would be enough for an entry-level position. Yet, it never was. I watched as my classmates, far more vivacious, far less studious, found more success in their careers than I had. Desperation settled into my stomach, gnawing at the growing uncertainty that I would never succeed beyond school internships and the service industry. But then I realized something. The overwhelming melancholia that dismantled the hope I had for my future led me to clear the pressure off of my career aspirations: if there was no future to work toward, rather than abiding by my carefully constructed strategy of working hard, any strategy was open for play. So, I approached my final semester’s internship with a new tactic. Instead of being the hardest worker, I was going to focus on being liked.
Being likeable is not a skill I can attribute to my education. However, learning to chat idly, appealing to the bitter humor of baby boomers, and smiling while unbelievably bored, are skills I’ve perfected as a bartender. Over the course of the four months of my internship term, I’ve embarked on a personal experiment. I established friendly relationships with colleagues, went out to lunch instead of working through it, even joined peers in the break room to talk about TV shows and knitting. I wondered if my efforts to be social would be more fruitful than efforts to be the best.
While the service industry requires little critical thinking in my experience, it does demand a plethora of conversational skills. People across a wide variety of demographics all come for a drink, some begging for attention, others surprising you, but almost all of them wanting to talk to you. I’ve learned to navigate conversations with strangers with ease, determining that you don’t need to know or even like someone to have a civil conversation. At my internship, I prioritized simply talking with everyone I could. I made my face a familiar one despite my limited presence and rather than allowing my computer and desk to absorb my attention, I shifted it toward others. I engaged in informational meetings, inquired about every person’s background, and forced myself to be the person they would think fondly of when they eventually forget the number of projects I contributed to or the times I helped them. Rather, I aspired to replace their memories of my work with thoughts of how I made them feel as a co-worker.
I cannot report whether it’s worked yet. If my career does find success, I can’t attribute that solely to my sudden-found socialization. And if it doesn’t, I wouldn’t entirely agree that choosing to strategize against working hard is the culprit. But, I advise anyone pursuing their graduate school career to remember the power of soft skills. While attaining experience and offering a concrete hands-on comprehension of the work being done is crucial, being a person people want to be around is equally as important. An office’s success isn’t a singular representation of the work being done, but an amalgamation of productivity paired with the teamwork and culture of the employees. Being a bartender, working a job that paid and had nothing in common with my career track, offered me skills that I wouldn’t have gained in a higher education setting. As I move forward in my career, the relevance of the service industry is unveiling itself, showing that knowing how to converse and handle people is as critical as an education itself.