At the time of writing I am an undergraduate student, but with the declining quality of fresh graduates I find it increasingly frustrating to work with fresh graduates who might only be a year or so older than me. Yes, it is true, them inexperienced younglings lack grit,foresight, and character to get a job done right and this is coming straight from another youngling’s mouth.
Consider this: the university hires a bunch of its own fresh grads straight out of university in entry-level positions in their offices. In one particular event I was a student member of a committee together with two members of staff who were fresh grads, let’s call them Sarah and Tony, and we needed to staff an engineering exhibition. Our jobs were quite simple; turn up, set up, answer visitors’ questions, pack up, clean up, closeup – for just three days.
Having several shifts of student volunteers, I only needed to turn up to the morning shift on the last day of the exhibition (having afternoon shifts for the two previous days). The exhibition was supposed to open at 10:30 in the morning, I arrived at 10:27 expecting the door to the gallery to be open and set up because I didn’t have the keys to help setup. Alas, the lights were off, and the doors were locked. Confused, I sent a message to the staff with privileges to unlock the door. Just in the nick of time, Tony arrived at 10:29 to open the door.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have the right keys to open the locked drawers where the exhibits were stored securely and had to go back to the office to get them from Sarah, who locked up last and didn’t pass him the key. Finally at 10:39, he comes back with the keys and the exhibits are placed on their display areas at 10:41. During those 11 minutes we had to turn away three visitors because there was nothing to see.
This isn’t even the end of it. When Sarah came along all they did was put the exhibits up and then proceeded to sit down in a small corner to do only what I could presume was work. They were laughing and chatting cheerily over a laptop computer and their smartphones in a public area of the gallery – if it was work they must really enjoy it. I sure wasn’t enjoying any of it.
There were candy wrappers on the floor that I had to pick up, then I discovered that the bins were full and hadn’t been cleaned out the night before, so I grabbed another student volunteer to help hold the lid open on one of the larger bins in the corridor to clear it out. The pantry table around the sink was dirty and I had to wipe it clean, the jug of stale water on the pantry table was a day old and half empty and the two fresh grad staff members hadn’t thought of cleaning and refilling it. What if a program director or a dean visits and asks for a glass of water? I cleaned the jug, refilled it with drinking water at a water fountain, wiped it dry on the outside, and placed it back onto the pantry table.
What the hell were those fresh grads thinking? A job isn’t only about a job description, it’s about taking full responsibility for your assigned area of work and taking pride in the job that you do. If you don’t respect the work that you do, keep your working area clean, arrive 15 minutes early to get organized so everything is in order by opening time, be prepared for random visits from supervisors, how do you expect anyone else to respect you? It doesn’t matter if you’re an entry-level employee or in director-level management, what you do matters and the work that you think others can’t see you do reflect on you when you come prepared – or unprepared.
I’m indifferent to who you are or what you look like, but what you do makes all the difference in how others respect you. Think ten steps ahead, get your act together.
