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I have been volunteering around town and I also had an internship in the past. However, I have never had an actual real job. My plan for the summer was to get an actual job.
My job hunting for the summer started pretty early. I started doing that in mid-March, writing my resume and cover letter for a teller kind of position at a regional bank. It was a very nice position. They called it as “Youth Team Member”. The employee would work full time in the summer, and part time during school year, for a year. The nice part of this job was that the bank will pay the youth team members to go to summer event as its ambassador. However, it was a very competitive position. In total there were over three hundreds applicants, and in my area, they were only looking for 7 people. In total, there were three processes of interview. First, if ones' resume looks reasonably good, that person would be invited to the information session. It’s called an “information session”, but actually it was a group interview. There were around 40 people invited to this process. Then there would be around 20 people getting selected to the one on one interview with the youth team manager and community manager. It was like the community involvement side of the position. After that, they would select 14 people to go to the branch interview; two people at each branch. Each branch manager would pick one people out of two, then that was the final seven people. This was a position mean to be for a grade 11 or 12 students. So in one's whole life, he or she can only apply for it twice. I applied for it last year, and I stopped right at the information session. And this year, I prepared for it and applied for this same position again. I went to all three interviews, and I stopped at the last interview. You know that feeling you want something so much, and you work so hard for it, then you almost get it, but you don’t. That was how I felt. And yeah, I knew it’s a brutal process since the beginning, but I was always optimistic.
Although I was optimistic, I was still smart enough to still keep an eye on other job postings. Last summer, I work as an intern at a summer camp program for kids. I had the opportunity to go on an interview for being either an on-call staff or an actual staff this year. I wasn’t great at that job. It was exhausting dealing with whole bunch of 5 to 12 years-olds. However, they pay well. So I decided to give it a try for the interview. The interview went okay, but I didn’t get any call back or email after that. Although I lost my phone during the week that they are supposed to call back, but they didn’t leave any voice-mail. I assumed even if they call, they were trying to tell me I didn’t get in.
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I knew the chance of working in a summer camp wasn’t big for me, so I was still looking for other jobs while I was waiting for them to call back. I checked job sections on websites of different local shopping malls, trying to find some job postings. Eventually I decided to go to the nearest shopping mall, and hand in my resumes to stores that were hiring. I wasn’t positive about whether I was going to get a call for interview, but I just told myself “whatever, you got to just try”.
I also went to websites of some big chains of clothing stores and summited my resume. I didn’t bother to write individual cover letters for each different company; I just changed the names. It was like quantity instead of quality. Of course none of these companies got back to me.
Luckily enough, I got a call from a shoe store that I applied in the mall. I was invited to an interview. The person interviewed me was the assistant manager, and the interview went pretty well. I was soon informed that I was offered a part-time position, but I needed to meet the manager of the store and finish some paperwork. The store manager was a Chinese lady. Her English was really good that I didn’t notice any accent when I talked to her over the phone. I thought she was born here, or immigrated at a very young age, until she told me that she actually firstly came here as an international student to study in university. After finishing the paper work, I was officially hired as a part-time associate with minimum wage.
I didn’t see myself as working in a shoe store and earning minimum wage. I aimed for something better, but this is what I eventually get. However, the experience of the whole process is something unique. It shows me the hope, the satisfaction, but also the cruelty of the real world. There is no ending of this process, I will need to repeat it over and over. I learn to accept disappointing results, and improve myself through failures. Then I aim for something higher, and fail again. It’s not like at school, everything is clear. I have to find out what’s wrong and what to do by myself. There is no clear ranking, it’s all relative. “Welcome to the real world”, the adults say.
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My first day at work was chill. It was like a paid training. I went through things like the company policy and general knowledge about human feet and shoes.
The store itself is sort of organized. The shoes are displayed on shelves following a certain kind of float, and the other pairs we have in the same style are stacking below the display shoes. This way we can easily tell whether we have a certain size of a certain pair of shoes. To make the things even easier and neater, we keep the boxes in the order of from the smallest to the largest sizes. There are two rows of shoes on the shelves against the wall. For those ones on the top row, the stocks are place on the top against the wall. So in order to get them, we have to use a special tool to get it off.
For the display shoes, they are always the right ones. We would keep the security tag on the left shoes of some more expensive pairs. For very expensive and popular boots, we keep the left one in the back room that only staff are allowed to get in. The store follow this kind of rules to minimize the potential risk of thievery. The display shoes are usually the smallest ones. When a display shoe is sold, we would replace it with the next smallest one.
When a sale associate is walking around helping customer, we call it “on the floor” in the shoe store. I had some short time on the floor during my first few shifts. My manager will usually assign a certain area to a certain associate, and that associate will help the customers that are shopping in that area. When there are not a lot of customers shopping around, the associate will do some auditing in the assigned area, or sometimes the manager will give some specific tasks. But customers are always more important, we would stop whatever we are doing if a customer needs help.
When a customer come in to the store, we would always make sure we greet them with a big smile. It’s important to give the customers some space, so we would wait for another 30 seconds before we approach the customers for the second time. Sometimes we can tell whether a customer needs our help. For those who are doing fine, we just let them shop on their own. For customers that needs help, we have to pay close attention, and approach them first when they seem to have trouble. My manager told me that it would be too late if a customer asked for help. “We always want to make sure we offer our help before they ask. It’s proactive”, my manager said.
(to be continued)