During the time I was in college, I had three student worker jobs. Throughout all three years I was an undergrad, I wrote for the school newspaper as a freelancer and occasionally took photographs for them (at a whopping $5 a photo and $10 an article – if they even got published). Since that wasn’t really enough cash to pay for much of anything, I also worked in the school scene shop and as a stagehand at the campus performing arts center – both of which were jobs that helped get a head start on my career.

If you don’t have a theater background, you may not know that a scene shop is the place where sets are made. My school had three student openings in the scene shop and I was lucky to get one of those positions and I held onto it for a year and a half. Like all the other student worker jobs on campus, it paid peanuts and was limited to 20 hours a week, despite the fact that we definitely worked way more than 20 hours a week in there. Our responsibilities were to take the set and lighting designers sketches and plans and turn them into reality. Through that job, I learned how to construct flats and platforms, a whole lot about scenic painting, and a lot more about lighting than I knew going in. I also learned a little bit about how much stuff costs by putting in requests for supplies and how much easier life is if you keep good and up to date inventories of items – especially in relation to the props and costume rooms. I learned how to train classmates who knew less about tools than I did (I had one particularly slow freshman drop a Fresnel on my head twice while trying to teach him how to hang lights). I left that job with stories about why you don’t build load bearing furniture out of luan, how carving a mountain out of foam is a horrible idea and how to build on the fly spot lights out of Source 4s and thick gloves – stories that I later used in job interviews.

The best part about that being my first ever theater job was that it was a safe place to screw up. I got the job initially because I was good at lighting. When I was tagged for the spot that opened up it was because the previous guy had been the go to person for all lighting stuff, and the scene shop manager had noticed that I always came in to lighting calls and had spent plenty of time working with the previous lighting guy. However, once I got the job, it became clear I was expected to learn all those other set building and scenic painting skills. The first time I ever used a chop saw, I almost cut off my arm. Fortunately, after the upperclassman I was working with who had the misfortune of trying to teach me how to use it recovered from the heart attack I gave him, I was allowed to take my time and actually learn how to use everything in the scene shop. Let’s be clear – to this day there is no job I despise more in theater than carpentry. I’ve never stopped hating it. But being able to do it has been the difference between paying my bills and signing up for unemployment on more than one occasion. And it all goes back to working in my college scene shop when I was 19.

I was finally able to leave the scene shop a little ways into my senior year of college when I got a job working at the school performing arts center. As far as I was concerned, this was the best student worker job there was. It didn’t have a 20 hour a week cap on it and if you worked more than 40 hours a week, you made time and a half. Also, on the really long calls (and by really long I mean working from like 4 am to 2 am the next morning), there were always several hours of downtime in the middle of the day when I could get a ton of homework done. Also, the technical director of the performing arts center would work around our schedules so that if there was a really long call and we needed to leave to go to class and come back, we could (as long as it wasn’t during show time). Stage hand work is kind of rough. Road cases are often ridiculously heavy and it’s just a ton of manual labor, but it’s another thing that pays pretty well (once you’re no longer being paid student worker rates). It also helped that our crews were mixed – 25% students and 75% professionals. Which meant that a bunch of seasoned, old roadies got used to working with me, saw that I was competent and then recommended me for other gigs after I graduated. Which was awesome. Several of my friends who also worked in the performing arts center went on to work in the casinos in Atlantic City (I went to school right outside of it), where you can make a really good living as a stage hand, and they all had a much easier time getting into it because of the connections they made at our college performing arts center.

The career path I actually wound up picking has been stage management and production management, but my first big break was as a stage manager on a cruise line where I was also expected to cover the duties of a technical director. Honestly, I’ve never been the most confident technician, but I had inadvertently racked up several resume credits that claimed otherwise – like student worker in a scene shop and stage hand at a performing arts center. The cruise ship job wound up being great and I actually was a decent technical director, primarily because of all that experience I gained in college. My entire career path has sort of blossomed from that first cruise ship gig and I often wonder if I hadn’t taken those jobs as a college student, if I would’ve had that same opportunities I’ve had. I guess I’ll never know, but in the end I’m definitely grateful for all those miserable hours carving foam mountains and wood-graining massive sets.

 

For more information on how to get through college debt free so you can take on the student worker jobs you want instead of just doing what you need, check out this giveaway of Debt Free U by Zac Bissonette. Giveaway ends 1/31.
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*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on Femme Frugality and The Broke and Beautiful Life*