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My first post-graduation job found me data-entering indecipherable strings of code into a system that would publish these hieroglyphics into industrial supplies publications. I worked in a department with other new graduates, all young women with the title, “editorial assistant”, on the 19^th floor of an equally inscrutable midtown building. No-one spoke to us, except a supervising manager, and occasionally, one of the single men in the marketing department next door. I wonder now, at the lack of training of us, the surety that the information about tractor-trailer parts in Cimarron, Kansas was importantly publishable. I’m still not sure who read these heavy volumes, issued by the hands of undervalued city girls, tapping out abbreviations of farming machines. We were kind of a machine ourselves. I am less sure how this corporation was in business. When it became clear that the history of a Kansas town named Cimarron was much more interesting than what I was supposed to be doing, and that I was writing poems with the names of the towns, Duboistown, Medicine Bow, Grenada, that my days at Thomas Publishing, Inc. were numbered.

 

I carried two or three jobs at any given time during my program work at Fordham University, working as a tutor, in the offices of financial aid and security while I studied full time. I duly visited the Career Services department and poured through the job listings available. Unfortunately, if there was career advisement taking place through the department, it was not made known. My professors were generous and encouraged my classmates and me in our work in their courses. The jobs I got were usually in higher education, waitressing and house cleaning. The strange, Bartlebyish job at Thomas, Inc., was gained through a New York Times ad. More happily, I found a job as an English as a Second Language teacher at a language school, also through the Times. That teaching job led me to another teaching job, a teaching fellow at my CUNY program. I am grateful for this experience, and hope to explore it in the future.

 

Career service networks and recruitment modules are still a bit puzzling to me. At my workplace, I collaborate with other staffers and students to develop activities and networks that we believe will support conversation about looking for the next step up. We rely on the official department of our parent school to work directly with our students. I compare the experiences of my students with my own. As a liberal arts and social science leaning thinker, I’ve learned how to look for myself, and represent my own work to potential employers, somewhat. I’m no longer the vague office girl, window shopping at lunch. Now, my work at a labor school with adult students, nurtures and pushes me along. I’m the one getting a real education, working with striving and politically active people who wear about five different hats at the same time: employee, parent, daughter/son, community member, union member, civic participator. And maybe, that is the real story here.

My first big job came before I graduated college, maybe in spite of graduating college.

Working summers in my father’s store-front print shop, I learned a lot about typesetting, printing, images and pages. But I also consumed too many books and movies about intrepid reporters, hot scoops and stop-the-presses.

In April of my junior year of high school, I wrote a letter to a little local newspaper saying that I would do anything to be a writer, a reporter, un journaliste! I’d wash windows, scrub floors, fetch coffee — anything to be near the newsroom. It turns out that just then little local newspapers were  buying their own publishing computers, and they needed somebody who knew about typesetting and printing, images and pages. I got to write stories from time to time, but I really loved making all the new computer gear clackety-clack in harmony.

It was very high tech, a half-dozen years before the IBM and Apple PCs. There were no video screens or disk drives. We punched out news copy onto paper tape along with program code and ran it through refrigerator-sized computers that would expose the pages onto film. I worked a 40-hour week through the end of high school, getting extra credit in English class for my tales from the newsroom.

College was tough because my family never had a lot of money — or anyone who’d ever gotten beyond twelfth grade. My first college loan included $1,200 to pay off my Catholic school tuition so the good fathers would give me my diploma which landed a small scholarship to St. John’s University.

I worked my way through two years at St. John’s by freelancing nights at small computer typesetting start-ups all over Manhattan, learning everybody’s code and seeing the best and the worst bosses side by side. Then I got a big job at a sizzling hot computer start-up, but it had to be days, so I transferred to the New School for Social Research where most classes were after 4:00 pm.

There weren’t a lot of computer science classes in those days. I took one programming course in COBOL, an ancient accounting language, but my tray of punched cards wouldn’t run at the NYU mainframe lab where the New School borrowed computer time. Nobody was a computer expert in the beginning. We were all learning on the job, making things up as we went along. Great mistakes were made, but so were great breakthroughs … and great paydays.

The sizzling hot computer start-up took off, bringing national recognition, more paydays plus a couple more start-ups.  Along the way, I finished college and got my degree, but they had to mail it because I was traveling on business during graduation.

I’m happy I got my BA. I think it made me a better thinker and speaker, but it’s hard to track the skills learned in the classroom into daily life. The New School then was a hot bed of post-structuralism with those French criminals Foucault and Derrida, and I’m glad I graduated just ahead of the horrors of critical theory and identity politics that have so defiled the academy.

Four years after my New School degree, I walked out of that sizzling hot job to start my own research and consulting business. I never worked a straight job again, but I did hire a lot of college graduates.

Jack Powers