College Spending Money

Between a couple of small scholarships and my summer and Christmas break jobs, I had enough money to pay for my undergraduate education (1966-1969). But there was very little left over and I needed to have occasional small jobs to give me any spending money during the school year. I had four different ones during those years that were very different from one another.

Apartment Cleaning

The longest lasting of my jobs came to me through a connection at church. There was an elderly couple who lived in a small apartment about a mile from where I was living. The man was disabled and wheelchair bound and his wife was blind. They wanted someone to come and clean their apartment every Saturday morning. The first two weekends they were there as they wanted to ensure that whomever they chose was both trustworthy and competent, but after that they generally left for the day (someone else came to pick them up), leaving me to finish the cleaning and lock and close the door when I was done.

My primary qualifications for this was that I had done a similar job for a short while when I was in high school for my Aunt Dot. But I was thorough and always on time and I got along well with this couple so they were willing to go with me – although I suspect that they originally thought that they would be hiring a female.

The job was pretty routine – vacuum all the carpets in the living/dining room and bedroom, sweep and mop the floors in the small kitchen and bathroom, dust everything, vacuum the upholstered furniture, scrub down the kitchen and bathroom counters, clean the toilet and bathtub, and strip and remake the bed, putting the linens and towels by the door for pickup by a laundry service.

After the first two weeks they agreed to pay me at an hourly rate based on how long it took me, but as I got better and faster, they paid the same total even if I took less time. So, it was a good, steady income for the two years I continued doing it. At the end of that time they were getting less and less able to continue living on their own and were going to be moving to an assisted-living arrangement and so my job ended. But I enjoyed working for this lovely couple.

Shoveling Snow

The block just to the north of where I was living had a series of about four small office buildings with various tenants – doctor’s office, insurance sales, etc. But the entire property had common parking areas and it was all owned by a common landlord. In the fall, he came to the building where I was living and asked if there was someone who would be willing to shovel all the walks and entrances to the buildings whenever it snowed and I took him up on his offer.

It was not steady work like the apartment cleaning, but was an “on demand” job for whenever it snowed. If the snow was light, then the job was over fairly quickly, but if it was heavy then it might take multiple passes as the snow piled up. My only equipment was a snow shovel – we didn’t have things like a snowblower back then.

The job paid based on an hourly rate, so I would keep track and turn in my hours after any storm. And the tenants, since their customers needed to use those entrances and sidewalks, would keep the landlord appraised of the quality of the work I did.

I did this for only one winter and for one major storm even had to subcontract another student to help me when the snow was coming down so fast that I couldn’t keep up with it by myself. The following winter I let that person take over for me as he needed the funds even more than I did and I still had my apartment cleaning job to give me regular spending money.

Tutoring in Math

One afternoon I was sitting in the living room of the living unit when a lady came in and asked if there would be anyone who could help tutor her son in math. He was in junior high and was struggling with that subject. Since math is one of my strong suits, I offered to assist him. We would meet twice a week for the rest of the spring to get him through his algebra I class.

This was quite a new experience for me. Knowing the subject is one thing, but being able to help someone who is struggling with that subject is totally different experience. But I am also patient, and the young man wanted so much to be able to pass his math class (so that he didn’t have to take it again the next year!)

This job lasted about 7-8 weeks and paid a rate that was pretty commonly known in the community for tutoring. I’m happy to report that the student progressed enough that he was able to pass his math class – I recall that he got a B for the spring semester which brought his grade for the course up to a C+. His mother was also very appreciative and gave me a few extra dollars at the end as a show of her thanks.

Reading to a Blind Student

In my final (third) year as an undergraduate, I was again in need of a bit of spending money. My apartment cleaning job had ended, so I needed something else. I decided to check a message board in the student union where people could either post needs for a job or jobs that people had to offer. I noticed a message about someone needing a “reader” and decided to give the person a call.

The number was for another student – a female student who was working on a graduate degree in speech pathology. The catch was that she was blind and needed someone who could read her textbooks to her while she took notes in braille. This was not something that I had ever done before, but I figured, “I’m a good reader, why not!”

I met her at her off-campus apartment about a mile from where I lived. I sat on one chair and xhe handed me the book for that class. I would start reading at the chapter she indicated and she sat at the table nearby and took notes in braille. The class was a graduate course in speech and there were a lot of words that I didn’t know – things like phonemes and allophones – and other even more technical terms. So, key to doing a good job was to be able to decipher the words as I went along and pronounce them correctly.

The job was one night a week for the quarter (10 weeks) and I was only reading the material for one class. I presume that she had others doing the reading for her other classes. We usually spent about an hour – but it was tiring, try talking for an hour without a break sometime! She would sometimes stop me to ask a question about what I had just read to be sure that she had understood properly.

I remember one evening, perhaps the third week that I was reading to her. I don’t recall what I had just read, but she commented, “you’re not from around here, are you?” That was correct – I was from Connecticut and this was in Michigan. But Connecticut residents in the SW part of the state have speech patterns that are very like those in NY City, those from the eastern part of the state have speech patterns that are similar to those from Boston, and since I was from the part of the state in between, our speech patterns are quite unaccented and thus quite similar to those from the Midwest. But it had taken a few weeks and a few hours of reading before we had encountered a word that was pronounced differently in my part of CT and her part of MI. She had a very keen ear and had caught that slight difference and so we discussed it briefly – adding to her understanding of speech.

This was probably the most interesting of the small jobs I had while in college as in the process of reading and interacting with this student I got to learn a few things as well. Enough so that after all these years I can still recall some of the things from that textbook that I mentioned above.

Working with other people – even people who are quite unlike yourself – can be very interesting. Whether it’s elderly folks, a junior high boy, or a graduate student in speech pathology, these experiences can be enriching to your life. (And being able to have some spending money to buy an occasional burger at McDonalds (for $.15!) was just a bonus.)