Despite being 22 years old, I don’t have many formative experiences under my belt. I haven’t held many jobs, and despite my high sense of empathy, I have never really volunteered. It’s at a point where I would take a look at a peer’s resumé and be embarrassed about how few experiences I had in comparison. Still, I should judge my experiences in my own context, and not by endlessly comparing myself to others. Here are the jobs I’ve had, what the job entailed, and what I gained from them.

Food server at the Stony Brook Union Café (August 2013-February 2014)

I briefly held this part-time job when I was a freshman, and it was the first job I ever had. The job mostly consisted of serving food to the students in a bufét styled cafeteria and doing whatever my superiors told me to do; the latter mostly consisted of washing dishes, setting up and breaking down serving stations, jumping to whatever station they asked me to go to, and recording the temperature of the food to see if they were up to standard. I didn’t think much of the job when I had it, although I can see what skills I gained from it when I left: I was able to take orders, adapt between workspaces, work as fast and efficiently as I was able, and speaking directly to customers on what they wanted.

File clerk at Port Jeff Medical Associates (January 2017-August 2017)

This was another part-time job I signed up for when my mother – a family physician – let me know that there was a position available at her office. While I was working there, I was tasked with taking received faxes, organizing them by the patient mentioned or the type of information it had, and delivering them to the doctors. This required that I look for a patient either in a computer database or through hundreds of physical charts, depending on the patient in question (or the doctor’s preference). My position also included doing whatever physical work or odd job was asked of me by either the doctors, the medical assistants, or the workers at the front desk or in medical referrals. As you might gather from my description, this involved a lot of grunt work, so this job got me used to doing repetitive tasks while also handling them with extreme care, given the importance of the medical records I was working with.