My sister is coming over to give a talk on the job search process to my students. I had to warn her to drop that entire part of her talk that she always employs with students in Montreal where she exhorts them to try working while they are in college.
One of the reasons why I like my students more than any of my previous ones is because nobody needs to beg them to work and acquire at least some work experience before the age of 24.
Clarissa's Blog 
Strange. We were all working when I was an undergrad at the UdeM. There was that one girl in my entourage who only had summer jobs, but that is all. And the vast majority of my students in Ontario work too.
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She spoke at McGill, of course. 🙂
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I am still surprised.
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The Bachelor of Commerce kids.
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Not surprised anymore.
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They are the same students who need to be convinced that they will not start making $80,000 the moment they graduate. THOSE kids, you know.
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Oh yes. We have plenty of those young adults where I teach. The most lucid of my business school students realize than being 1 out of the 1000+ students graduating with a business degree from our school every year will not guarantee them an excellent job in a bank or a consulting firm.
So many students graduating with a business degree…
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I have known several students who fail in college and never graduate because of working while a student. It is really unfortunate that our system necessitates that so many students work. But employers frequently demand so much time that students have no time or energy left for studying, reading, or even thinking. This happened to one of the most talented mathematics students I have ever known about five years ago.
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I worked an array of crummy, badly paid jobs as a student and achieved a lot more in my field than my fellow students who didn’t have to work.
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I think it depends on a lot of factors, mostly personality. I had a student who was very talented, but was of a one-track mind and could really achieve great things, but had to be 100% focused on no more than one project at a time, and did not do very well with any distractions or satellite projects. In contrast, I have a student now who does great with “distractions”: different duties like TA-ing and satellite projects give him structure, which keeps him from procrastinating and from getting demoralized (there is always something else to do when stuck on one project), and generally helps maximize productivity.
I can envision the 2nd student happily holding several part-time jobs in addition to school and doing great, like Clarissa. My first student, not so much; his faith would probably be more like that of David’s talented student.
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Who’s paying the first student’s living expenses?
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They are grad students in the STEM fields, so they had RA-ships (basically paid to do the research for their dissertation) and partial TA-ships. The first student was entirely disrupted by having to teach even a little bit (3 contact hours per week). The second could take a higher load and keep up, even increase, his productivity in research when TA-ing.
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Ah, well, this is a completely different thing. Grad students, indeed, shouldn’t have to take part-time jobs. Teaching and / or research are their job. Grad students should get funding that will allow them to dedicate themselves to research. Of course, I didn’t do any part-time jobs in my grad school. I had signed a contract with my university promising that I wouldn’t.
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FWIW, a lot of my undergrads work as well. Some do great in classes, too. But it seems that once they have a full time job, it gets really tough to keep up with school. Holding several part-time jobs is manageable, especially if they are local, i.e. at the coffee place on campus, library, doing formal tutoring of freshmen, or what have you. I know 2 who worked all summer in back-breaking construction jobs, and earned enough to pay their way during the academic year. I really admire those people.
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That’s what all of my students are like. The only time they don’t work is when they are unemployed and looking for a job. And that’s why I love them! I get them, I get their reality, I can relate.
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How many hours a week did you work? Many students that I have known have found that if they do their jobs well, their employers keep increasing their hours until they are working more than 40 hours a week. Since to do mathematics well requires ten hours a week per course, at minimum, this quickly means no sleep, or else very poor academic performance. I routinely tell students that they should never be surprised or upset that a particular homework problem takes them five or six hour to solve.
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