Today’s guest post comes from Emily and she kicks off a series of guest posts about how picking certain student worker positions in college can really help guide your career path and give you an edge when it comes time to apply for jobs.

Emily blogs at Words I Wheel By where she writes about her experiences as a disabled 20-something and explores disability rights issues. She loves connecting with people, so you can like Words I Wheel By on Facebook and follow her on Twitter @emily_ladau.

I held three different jobs throughout my time in college, each one leading me closer to realizing my ultimate goal and passions. I still remember my excitement the day I got my first job. The director of the Writing Center at my university approached me to work as a tutor, just one month after beginning freshman year. She had learned about my writing after reading the winning essay I wrote for a contest held for incoming freshmen. Up until that point things were going well, but like all other new college students, I felt like just another new kid in a sea of faces. The prospect of having an on-campus job felt like a step in the right direction to putting myself out there.

Taking a job at the Writing Center was an ideal situation for me. I didn’t have my driver’s license so I couldn’t search for off-campus work. By becoming a tutor, I had an easy five-minute commute from my dorm. Morever, working a student job meant finding a place in a community of students ranging from freshmen to graduate students. My fellow tutors quickly became some of my favorite people on campus, which meant I usually looked forward to going to work.

I chose to keep a schedule of 15 hours per week. Each day, I had appointments with students of all majors to work with them on their assignments during various stages of the writing process. In addition to the social benefits, the time I spent tutoring was a perfect resume-building experience. My plan at that time was to pursue a career teaching high school English, so it was rewarding to help people while continually improving my own writing skills. And I was getting paid to do it! Each time a student had an “aha!” moment or a breakthrough, I would marvel at the fact that it was all part of a day’s work.

I should probably mention that lots of this bright-eyed excitement also stemmed from the fact that tutoring was my first official job. I never had the opportunity to work while in high school, so working in college made me feel pretty legit. Plus, the Writing Center offered one of the highest student salaries. My parents had instilled within me the value of being responsible with money, but earning my own paycheck gave me my first taste of what financial independence would feel like. I thought I had it made.

After a few semesters, though, as my course load became more challenging, I began to find that the hours I was working became dearly missed when I finally sat down to tackle homework at the end of the day. I enjoyed tutoring, and I appreciated the bit of income, but I needed to find a job that somehow afforded me more time to focus on everything else I needed to accomplish. Moreover, my career aspirations were completely changing. I no longer wanted to be an English teacher. My passions for writing and helping people remained, and were definitely made stronger by tutoring, but I wanted to use them for a different purpose: advocacy for disability rights.

The dream of pursuing a career in advocacy stemmed from the fact that I was born with a physical disability called Larsen syndrome. I have always been a strong advocate for disability rights, but as I honed my writing and communication skills through work and classes, I realized I could use these skills to dedicate myself to activism full time. So, to give myself more time to get all my work done and to work on following my dream, I decided it was time to move to another job.

I knew that leaving the Writing Center would be tough because I’d miss the people, the experiences, and, of course, the paycheck. But by the following semester, it became clear that I had made the right decision. My newly found free time give me the chance to finish homework earlier each night while balancing my social life and taking on not one, but two new jobs. Now, I know you’re probably wondering why on earth I’d leave one job to take on two, and how I managed to find more time by doing this. It’s simple: I had a strategy.

The first new job I took was hall attending, which entailed nothing more than sitting in the front of my dorm and signing people in for a few hours on a couple nights a week. This gave me the chance to do homework while getting paid. And though it might seem silly to have moved from a skilled job to a job that required no skills at all (and that only paid minimum wage,) it was worth it, because this extra time to do work gave me the freedom to apply for a second job when an opportunity presented itself my senior year. I got to work with a student with Asperger’s syndrome, which combined my advocacy, tutoring, and communication skills all in one job.

All of these work experiences and transitions in college culminated into something incredibly valuable by pointing me in the direction I want to go in life. I developed a concrete understanding of the importance of earning money by my own doing, built up my resume, and moved closer to my dream career. Cliché though it may sound, now that I’m a recent graduate starting in the real world of employment, I couldn’t be more grateful for all the insight I gained about myself and my passions by including work in my college experiences and taking chances.