While applying for a job can feel similar to plunging off someplace high without a parachute, many students voluntarily take this risk on a regular basis. Having a job provides not only a regular salary, but also meaningful experiences and relationships for those who enjoy their work. As the seasons change and opportunities for summer jobs become available, students look for new and intriguing ways to spend their time at work, revealing tips and tricks for the art of job hunting.

Junior Sonja Mischke aims to work at a local ice cream shop, Connie’s Creamy Cone. “I looked around and looked for places I could get to by bus or car. I did a very informal interview. The owner [of Connie’s Creamy Cone] likes to see the kids who’re applying,” she said. Mischke looked at a lot of other places including Key’s Cafe & Bakery, which specializes in home-cooked goods, and Snuffy’s, a malt shop, before deciding on Connie’s Creamy Cone.

Junior Samantha Linn worked at Grandview theater for nearly a year and a half before she quit earlier this spring due to a lack of time. Linn was pretty anxious about entering the work world. “My mom really wanted me to get a job and I refused to approach managers, so finally she just dropped me off at the only movie theater we go to, the Grandview theater on Grand and Fairview Ave. She said, ‘go in there, get an application, and make a good first impression,’ and I did,” Linn said.

The aspect of her job which Linn loved the most was, undoubtedly, the people. “Everyone that I worked with were people I would’ve never met otherwise. It was really nice to see how much I had in common with people that I otherwise wouldn’t have connected with,” she said. “If you’re looking to apply for a job, go somewhere where you don’t know people because it’s important to put yourself in an environment that makes you a little uncomfortable at first.”

The type of jobs students take extend beyond those at local cafes and movie theaters. Junior Sandhya Ramachandran is passionate about her work as an intern at a University of Minnesota lab.
At the start of her internship, Ramachandran was mostly just shadowing people within her lab and working on research with Dr. Sharbani Chattopadhyay, her supervisor. “[Dr, Sharbani] was working on this disease called mucopolysaccharidosis [or metabolic disorders] and she had me analyzing the images that she had taken of these neurons with various tags, basically to figure out which vector was interacting the most cells, so that they would know which vector to use to get the treatment to the neurons,” she said.

However, Ramachandran was able to continue her research in the winter when she returned to the lab as a part of her scientific research class at SPA, “[They] gave me more of my own project as part of [their project]…it was focused on strokes. They’re trying to develop a stem cell treatment for strokes because the treatments that they have for it right now have a time window of only two or three hours. With stem cells, they’ve extended that window to up to two days within which treatment would work,” she said.

With Dr. Xiao, a post-doctor also assigned to this project, Ramachandran is going to do “co-cultures and various types of mixing…I’m going to use a protein to stimulate the immune cells as if they were undergoing an immune response and observe how the stem cells affect that response through a couple tests,” she said.

During Ramachandran’s interview with Dr. Walter Low, he asked her why she was interested in stem cell research. “In biology, we did that project on experimental stem cell type stuff and I was interested in stem cells because of that,” she said “he wanted to make sure I was actually interested and not doing something because my parents wanted me to.”

Although students have many reasons for having a job, from needing the extra money to wanting to gain experience in specific fields for the future, the vast majority of students also harbor a passion for their work. Like Parsons said, “it’s something I would do even if I wasn’t paid.”

This story was revised on May 30 to correct that in the photo  Ramachandran is working on ischemic strokes not mucopolysaccharidosis.  Dr. Xiao is post-doctor not post-graduate.