Do you guys work while attending University?

[amuron]

I think it comes down to choices... my roommate spent around 40 hours a week drinking beer and chasing women and worked 15 hours/week.

I put in 60 hours a week on 2 jobs, plus took full loads of 18-21 credit hours, but skipped the beer and woman chasing for the most part.

At the end, I had my pilots license and enough relevant technical experience to jump into a startup operation as the sole electrical engineer. My roommate had huge debt, lots of headaches, and a few scars from bar fights, but managed to get an entry level management position.

Its cool when you can apply what you learned in class the same day, or in a number of cases had done so before hand. One of my jobs was designing and building prototype electronics devices, so it worked out pretty well, the other was an airplane mechanics assistant.

Ron

 

[Dracovich]

I think it can definitely be done. Personally i'd love ot have more money but i get by ok on the government money i (and evreyone else for that matter) get. Personally I've kinda decided not to work unless i find something that really fits with my situation, since I'm at school from 8/9AM until around 3/4PM, then i get home, eat/digest for about 2 hours and then go off and train for about 2-3 hours each night. Then fridays i have set aside for drinking at the university bar.

So if i wasn't training i think i could easily work a few hours a day if i were to find a job that worked around the hours of my school well. Just think about it, are you studying every waking hour? or do you just sit around and slack off outside the hours you use at your school (selfstudy included of course)? That's what i do anyway.

Just a thought here though, i wouldn't recommend working with a mentally draining job like dealing with customers too much. I used to be a teller at a supermarket, and later working as a customer support guy at an ISP, and i was insanely drained mentally when i came home, i just wanted to punch something and go to sleep, i'd imagine that this coupled with a hectic study schedual would be hard.

 

[BobG]

The ideal case is to find one of those jobs that tend to exist on college campuses where you can get paid for barely having to do any work. If you're lucky, you can get paid to sit behind a desk and do your homework :D.

I work for the ITS department at my school staffing the helpdesk for students (about 8 hours a week). Libraries are apparently pretty good, too. Generally, we have little or nothing to do, so I'll just pull out my work and do a math problem set.

We don't get paid much, but if I'm only actually working 25% of the time (and time I'd probably be wasting anyways) it's like getting paid $35/hour for a couple of hours a week of lost time.

Admittedly, that's not a huge amount of work depending on the degree to which you need to support yourself, but there are opportunities out there if you look for them.

Night time security guards are good jobs for students. "Good worker" usually means being one that stays awake ... and what else could keep a student awake and alert all night other than homework and studying?

 

[Grogs]

Night time security guards are good jobs for students. "Good worker" usually means being one that stays awake ... and what else could keep a student awake and alert all night other than homework and studying?

I've always thought that would be a good student job too. I think the only real problem would be the hours. I find it's hard to shift the hours when I sleep around frequently. If it was a late afternoon-midnight shift, it would probably be no problem to keep a consistent cycle, but if it was from say midnight to 8 AM, I'd probably be sleepy either during work or class. I guess everyone's results would vary though.

We had a pretty nice deal going in when I lived in Virginia. We had a rescue squad that handled all the ambulances for the local area. At night we used volunteers, but in the daytime we had to pay people. It didn't pay all that well, but it was nice in that is was a 12-hour shift, so you could do it once or maybe twice a week and get a decent number of hours. Some shifts were very busy, but the norm was hanging out at the station reading, watching TV, etc while you waited for a call.

 

[Chaotic42]

I work 40 hours and go to school full time. The thing that I don't like about it is that I have to drive 2.5-3 hours every day. If it weren't for all of the time on the road, it wouldn't be so bad.

I'm a low energy person though. ;)