Administrative Assistant at an Ivy League University

Female, mid-20s

Large Mid-Atlantic city

“I’m gonna say a bit about job titles...you meet people and they ask ‘what do you do?' You’re a teacher and that’s part of your identity to some extent. My job has zero meaning. Well, not zero meaning, but it’s not something that I want to identify with. I do my job well, but it’s not my passion. There are definitely pros and cons to having a job like mine. I work 9 to 5, and I really work 9 to 5. Everyone is nice and pleasant and there’s nothing about my job that I hate. I have my own office, which is a dream. What’s cool about it is that when I am doing nothing, I can do other stuff. I’m taking classes at the school, so I can do homework. I definitely try use my free time well, though I also waste a good amount of it. No one’s watching me. The boss I have is very hands-off. I think he kind of knows that I’m not doing a lot during the day, and he seems cool with it as long as I do what I need to do.

When people ask me what I do, I usually say ‘I work at [Ivy League University].’ You get a little bit of gravitas from that. When people probe further, I usually say that I’m an admin but I also tell them that I’m taking classes. I guess I think I sound more impressive if I say I’m working a boring job in order to get a psuedo-prestigious degree. But I’m not even sure if I’ll actually get my master’s at the end of all this….  

We all are supposed to be doing something that we love and what we’re good at, but is it really that bad if we’re doing nothing important? Especially in generations before ours, people would work at jobs their unfulfilling job for decades without complaint until they retired. A job was just a job that you did to make money so you could have a life. Why do we feel like we’re special just because we went to college? I guess it was unrealistic for me to assume everyone who receives a higher education ends up in an exciting and fulfilling career.

I’m trying to decide how long I want to keep doing this until the next thing, whatever that is. I have so many different interests: I’m taking classes which is sort of a hobby, I’m making my own clothes now, I’m running an etsy page, and I like to do basic stuff like cook and garden, and now I have a house to work on. I always have a list of projects and I always have something to do. I’m more okay working my job because I know I have so many other things going on in my free time. My life goal is to be a modern renaissance woman— to be good at as many things as I can, since I can’t think of one thing that I’d want to devote all my time to.

There’s something about being at a big university that’s kind of freeing-- you’re in this giant system. They’re accommodating. There are people that work part-time. My environment specifically is really good about being flexible as long as you do your job. As far as I know, no admin there thinks it’s their life’s work. At my last job [administrative assistant at a high-end furniture studio] , it was weirder. You were participating in supporting this artist doing this big thing. The general feeling in the office was that you were supposed to feel lucky to be participating in this-- to be creating art in America. [The furniture designer'] said to me once, ‘not that I think I’m the shit or anything, but it’s really cool that you get the opportunity to work for me as an artist.’ I was getting paid $10 an hour at that time, part time. Is that opportunity worth more than having the money to go do fun things when I wanted to? And I wasn’t even making things, I was answering emails and phone calls and organizing closets. I was supposed to care so much about what I was doing. At the time, I wanted to keep working there. I thought my coworkers were great. I didn’t want to lose the really great work environment I thought I had. I didn’t care so much about the work I was actually doing, but I thought the whole thing was cool. I don’t think I felt more meaning in my job there because I was supposed to. There, I had to pretend I was on my computer doing work even when there was not actually any work for me to do. When I started looking for other jobs, I felt bad and extremely guilty, like I was going to hurt them in some way by leaving and I put their feelings ahead of mine. They kept saying they were going to promote me to full time soon, so I waited months before I actually started looking for a new job. When they finally offered me full time employment, I stupidly told them that I was interviewing somewhere else, and they fired me. I knew that they weren’t putting me first. A business is a business, and they have to look out for their business, so I have to look out for me and not think so much about others. Right after I got a full time job, they emailed me asking if I was free to do some part time work, and I felt vindicated when I said I was employed full-time. Once, the artist said ‘we only want people who want to be here,’ but who would want to be there making so little money that badly?

Overall, I don’t believe in having a calling, but I want to believe in having a calling. I was an undecided major in college until the very last second, so I graduated with art and anthropology degrees because those are fun. And I wasn’t really the best at anything but I was pretty good at most things I tried, so I did a Fulbright year abroad after graduating hoping something would become clear to me during my time there. It was kind of fun to be treated as important for the year. There were parts that I did like [about teaching English], but I didn’t see myself doing it long-term. I keep on thinking that the perfect thing for me would show up in some way-- which it still might. I went for a walk with my mom this weekend and I ran into my doctor. His daughter-- while she was doing this temp job, they found that she was a super smeller and now she has a really high-paying job where she tests the smells of things and she gets to be an artist on the side. How cool is that, but also how do you even discover something like that about yourself? It would be really great if we all had multiple purposes. Maybe I should pick something and go with it. I thought because that I did well in school and I did a cool gap year thing, I could come back and get a job relatively easily, but I had a hard time finding a job. I didn’t think I was a genius, but I did all the right things and it was still really hard to find a job. It kinda made me think that this super big thing wasn’t going to appear for me.

I remember reading that our generation is going to have like 5 different careers-- not different jobs, different careers. We lack a lot of the security things like pensions, et cetera. Some people just know what they want to do and then do it, and I so wish I did, but then again when that one thing doesn’t work it, it’d be so devastating.

My plan as of now is to keep trekking on, do this master’s thing and hope that I find something important to do along the way. The professor that I work for has guilt-tripped me into not leaving, (he doesn’t want to switch people), so that’ll be a test to see if I leave without feeling a ton of guilt. If I’m still there in 5 years, I might move to part time and do something else on the side. At the moment, my partner and I are happy and healthy and enjoying our lives. We could be doing more ‘meaningful’ things, but honestly, if we’re happy with our lives, I don’t know why we we should feel like we need to be doing more.”