The Transition from Studying To Paid Work

most of my friends were going through the same thing at the same time so we bored the others to tears telling work stories for about 6 months until we realised that our stories were just as tedious as theirs.

my first post-college job was in the library of the university i went to so there wasn't an enormous culture shock. i did find it hard at first to be tolerant of my, much older, co-workers talk of soap operas and house decoration, just as i'm sure they found me terrible for coming in in the same clothes as the day before having slept on someone's floor after a party. i'd had an early starting part-time job most of the way through college so i was used to the early mornings. the thing i missed most (and still do) was not being able to go to the cinema in the afternoon.

The thing I found most difficult was the length of time I was expected to work for. I'm far better doing an hour on, half an hour off, an hour on, half an hour off... Obviously, that's much easier to do if you're studying at home than if you're sitting in an office. I do think my addiction to ILX has something to do with not being able to put my head down and work non-stop for three or four hours until lunch.

yes, I remember feeling extremely tired in the first few weeks of my first job. Also, I resented ppl constantly looking over my shoulder to see what I was doing. In retrospect, I did suffer from bad management at my first two employers but of course at the time I just thought that this was the way things worked, ie that managers slagged you off because that was what they *did* and it wasn't actually related to the quality of your work. But the thing that I found hardest to cope with was that I was no longer working towards something. I didn't feel that there were any goals to aim for any more. At school it was "pass these exams and you get to university", followed by "pass these exams and you get a degree". But in my early days of work it just seemed like one big meaningless void.

You mean it *changes* from being a big meaningless void?

I had no problems. Then again I hadn't been really been studying for the couple of months before I left, more like lying in bed and weeping all day...

i enjoyed my first job as it mostly involved finding information for people who were studying. it was easy to identify with them and i thought, still think, it's a worthwhile thing to do. so that job had meaning for me. *sigh* if only i could say the same about my current job.

this is a very difficult thing to actually judge. It is not easy to see whether one finds work-related things less boring or whether one simply gets used to the boredom! The other thing is that there were certain aspects of office conduct that did not come naturally to me. I had to learn a good telephone manner, for example. Whilst I have never been obsequious and never will (disliking brown-nosing little creeps is something which I'd imagine will be commonplace amongst ilx contributors and rightly so) it took me a while to learn to me sufficiently diplomatic not to comment whenever I could see something awry which I took exception to, or could see a better way of doing something. Many of my run-ins with managers in the early days were where I was asked to do something in a really inefficient way, suggested a better way and got a straight refusal for it even to be considered (regardless of whether this was a lack of will or a lack of means). Adjusting to a heirarchical command structure was oh so hard.

In my case, the transition involved a four-month period of unemployment. At the end of this, the prospect of getting up early, being polite to w*nkers and taking ill thought out direction so I could earn some decent scratch became oddly appealing. This feeling lasted about a week into my first full-time job.

On the one hand, it was hard work. On the other, it was for something that we believed in, and money=nice. I did go out and buy a graphic novel and a new CD every week for the first year.

I am currently finding this transition quite difficult, but I think it's also a new town, setting up house and other things. I have just realised that spending a small amount of money each week on something nice like a cd or a book is a great way to reconcile yourself to work. And it makes setting up house more fun than doggedly saving all yr cash to get a washing machine/vacuum cleaner/table etc.

However I haven't found a solution for my inability to concentrate solidly on one project for hours at a stretch and consequent feelings of guilt. I wondered about asking one of my coworkers, but can't think of a way to phrase the question that doesnt make me sound really slack.

Getting paid is great (new CDs yay) and my job is varied enough to keep me from being too bored. What I like best though, is that once I leave work each day my time is my own - no more 24-hour worrying about all the texts that need to be read, essays and summaries and crap to write, exams to study for, etc etc etc.

coping by not coping: grad school -> academia