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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 30, 1984)
C ™ viaABW vi ^'-IJL *»so3 ?V j ^ ■ ■ -j. v_-/ -j- ^ ■ -f ^ -f ^ ^i / v <j CJ>ff-campus emp Toyers Photo by Mike Davis Angie Wilson, a sophomore animal science major from College Station, works as a cook in Post Oak Mall to earn extra money. Students schedule hours around tests By LAURI REESE Stall Writer Many students work to pay for tuition, room and board, and books. Others just want weekend money. For whatever reason, hundreds work as wait ers, grocery store clerks, secre taries, etc., all over College Sta tion and Bryan. Alan Scaz/ero, the manager of the Cow Hop, says all 25 of the restaurant’s employees are Texas A&M students. He says he hires students be cause the market is seasonal, and almost all of the customers are students. Most of the Cow Hop’s business is done while school is in session, and that’s when students usually want to work. Scazzero says he hires a few new employees at the beginning of each semester. Sophomore Mike Smith has worked at K-Mart since August. He says his parents give him weekend money, but he pays for everything else, including tuition and room and board. Smith, a meteorology major, hopes to save enough money now that he won’t have to work his senior year, and can just concentrate on studies, he says. His only problem with work ing and going to school at the same time is with scheduling, he says. He tries to ask off before big tests and assignments but sometimes when they really need him he has to work any way, he says. An employee of Piggly Wig gly, a grocery store in College Station, says most students that work at the store don’t have any serious problems when trying to get off work when they need to. The management is reasonable and tries to work with the em ployees, he says. The store hires a lot of stu dents because they are more de pendable when it comes to punctuality and getting the job done, he says. Freshman Bill Frawley, a civil engineering major, began working as a deliveryperson as Rascal’s, a restaurant in College Station last semester. He says he wasn’t really looking for a job but was just eating at Rascal’s one night when a manager asked him if he knew anyone interested in delivering. He’s had the job ever since. Frawley says he works one oi two nights a week and a Five- hour shift on Saturday or Sun day. He says he has no problems whatsoever with scheduling. One lime he told his boss he had a lot of tests coming up and so he wasn’t scheduled at all ! that week. Junior Gregg McAteer, a pe troleum engineering major, quit his job at a local restaurant at the beginning of the semester. He says his job got to be a pain in the neck at the end of the semester because school got harder like it always does but his employers still expected the same amount and quality of work. McAteer says he quit the job because he is taking a harder load this semester and knew he’d have less time. He also says he was just plain tired of waiting tables. A manager at Skaggs Alpha Beta says the percentage of stu dent employees at the store has gone dowm in recent years, but still close to half of the employ ees are students. He says so many employees are students not because they are the only ones who apply, but because most of the jobs are front-end jobs and to work on the front-end, you have to start as a sacker. Students are the only people willing to start at sacker rates, he says. Ways to handle job pressures by LAURI REESE At Ease staff Working and going to school at the same time can create a stressful situation. Student workers not only have to make a special effort to fit everything in and manage their time, they often are overcome with feelings of helplessness, frustration and despair. This stress can lead to de pression, which is serious busi ness, says Penny Haus, a coun seling psychology intern at the Texas A&M Studnt Counseling Service. One of the best things to do to relieve job/school stress is to break your work into small pieces and take it one step at a time, she says. It's also important to make time for relaxation and playing, Haus says. Coke breaks are good as long as they aren't too long, she says. For example, if you say you're going to take a 15-minute break and then take a 30-minute break, when you start studying again you may waste the first half hour worrying and kicking yourself for your lack of disci pline. Haus says relaxation tapes, available at the Student Coun seling Service, are good to listen to on study breaks because they allow you to experience what you're body feels like when it's totally relaxed. Exercise also is helpful, she says. When a person is tense, his or her body doesn't get the ox ygen it needs. Exercise helps the body get this oxygen. Often, when a person is under a lot of stress, they don't eat right, which puts them under even more stress, Haus says. It's a never-ending cycle. When you just eat candy bars and drink coffee and cokes, your whole body becomes geared to ward anxiety, she says. Sometimes, Haus says, stu dents really are overloaded. In these cases, she advises the stu dents to cut back on either the hours they tke in school or the hours they work. Alan Scazzero, the manager of the Cow Hop, says he tries to make sure employees don't take on more than they can handle. He says he starts all employees out with just a few hours and lets them add hours when they are ready. All 25 restaurant employees are students. Scazzero says he tries to give all employees short shifts. Sophomore Donna Tole says handling working and going to school at the same time was a big problem at first. She says she could see all her friends not studying and doing all the things she used to do be fore she started working earlier this semester. Tole says her grades have gone down since she started working. "I used to study during the day and blow off the nights," she says. "Now I work during the day and still blow off the nights." What degree will get the best job? By BONNIE LANGFORD Staff Writer What's the real scoop on the job market? Is that medi tation professor really honest about the sudden demand for transcendental specialists, or does he just want you to fill the class quota? Is the philos ophy class just as important as the computer class, when considering future jobs? Don't worry, here is the At Ease list of popular and promising careers for the 1980s bachelors' graduates to let you know what's waiting in the job world. And you don't have to take our word for it; it's what the experts who write the books and keep the statistics out there have to say about it. First, a bit about what makes any career easier to ob tain. Computer knowledge makes any job application look more attractive. It doesn't matter how much you hate WYLBUR, or if you insist an Apple is still a fruit, computers are here to stay. A good place to start looking for a job is the mili tary. If you're the kind of per son they want, it's a great place to obtain that ellusive job experience. It's not totally like "Officer and a Gen tleman," and it's not just for guys. Now some bad news. Col lege students who graduate without a career path in par ticular will find it harder to get a job any better than one they could have gotten straight out of high school. Teaching is a bad choice for a big demand career. More than 130,000 certified teach ers graduate each year, looking for fewer than 94,000 jobs. The worst news yet is that the popular careers for liberal arts majors are the ones with the lowest job growth. It's hard to find a job with a lib eral arts degree; the only an swer to helping in the job hunt is specialization, espe cially in the technical areas. See “Grad” page 15