“My mom told me once that work is about the 3 P’s: the people, the process, and the purpose. To be content at your job, you’re supposed to like two of them.”
Tutor Supervisor at a Foster Care Agency
Female, mid-20s
Large Northeastern City
“I’d describe my job as stressful, fulfilling, emotional, helpful. I really like my job, and part of my relationship with my job right not is figuring out how long I want to be there. I didn’t intend to be at this job for this long. In recent weeks, the parts I don’t like have been around more. Recently, I’ve had to think about whether or the parts I do like are good enough. When I first started, I was working with 18 students and I liked that, but tutoring is really lonely, and I also had a weird schedule so it felt particularly isolating, but I liked working with kids a lot and I still do. In my current role, I only work with 4 kids and I manage adults and make calls on behalf of the program as a whole. Now, I miss working with kids and I have to think more about what the tutors need and what they’re not doing well, and I don’t have as much time to think about students.
I’ve mostly worked in social service type jobs, where work-life balance was talked about but not really practiced, so I think it is an important concept especially with people working in social service type jobs. I recently had to work on not taking my work home and not giving out my personal number to kids who then called me at one in the morning. So I think we talk about it a lot, but we don’t actually have it. My boss can tell me and tell me and tell me to take more time off but you still know that when you stay late, it looks good. People appreciate it and notice it. I think sometimes too that more than the place I work-- my boss actually is very good about work-life balance stuff, and part of the pressure to work a lot comes from an internal place when you’re working with students and it’s hard for me to stop even when he tells me to and I think that’s something I see with a lot of people who work with kids. And when I see my tutors not go to certain lengths, I think “you should care more,” but actually they’re caring the right amount for them. The tutors who have other projects-- that’s been a challenge for me because this is what I care about and I’m all-in. When people are working with kids as a side gig, they have an easier time of turning it off and it’s hard for me to see that. I’m in this 100% of the time and it’s not a fair thing for me to ask of anyone else. They HAVE to have that work-life balance.
After college, I worked as a teaching assistant in a high school. I decided that I wanted to try a job not in education because I hadn’t tried anything else. Then, I worked at [large university press] for 3 months. That was ending, because it was just an internship. I was still applying to a bunch of jobs that were not ed-related, and I wasn’t getting calls for anything of them because all my resume was ed-related. When I was at [large university press], anything that felt not related to helping people felt pointless. Being unemployed made me go into a panic about work because it felt like a long time to not be working. It also felt like you’d see the perfect job online, you’d be like “that’s me!,” you’d apply and then you’d never hear from them again. When I got this job, I wasn’t that pumped about it because it was completely student-facing and I was hesitant about the funky schedule, but I accepted it because I felt like I can’t be unemployed.
I anticipate staying at this job -1 years from now. I thought I would leave a few months ago. [When asking about the idea of a “calling,] I don’t really believe in that personally. I think that it can be dangerous for people to look for “the thing.” I think the truth is that all of us could be doing different things and you have to pick one and roll with it until you don’t like it anymore. I’ve had a lot of conversation with friends who have paralyzed themselves in what they want to do forever. And you should just a pick a thing, and I try it. I think most of us are just doing things that we think that we’ll like until we don’t like it anymore.
The main thing I want people [about my job] to know is that perceptions of foster care are different than from what most people think. I think first I’d want people to know that even though it’s a flawed system, there are time when it’s really necessary. I’d want them to know things that are probably similar to what teachers want people to know about their kids-- they’re not all sad and angry, they’re really different and smart and great and not all defined by this terrible thing that happened to them as kids. What surprised me most about my job is that I liked it. I really did think that I was gonna hate working on the weekends or in the evenings, but it was actually fine. A lot of the time, when people ask me what I do, I know that people are gonna act kinda weird when they hear foster care because they’re like oh my gosh, that’s so great, and that makes me feel weird because it’s just my job and it’s not because I’m better than you. I feel like they act like you’re bragging your goodness points and that’s literally just my job. But I’m also happy to talk about my job and I’m pretty proud of it and I like knowing stuff about this thing that I think that a lot of people don’t really know about and it’s cool to answer if they have questions about it.
My mom told me once that work is about the 3 P’s: the people, the process, and the purpose. To be content at your job, you’re supposed to like two of them. For me, work is…necessary, but can be fulfilling and good.”