Student Workers At Texas A&M Earn And Learn – Some In ‘Cool’ Jobs

About 10,000 students at Texas A&M University are working part-time on campus this fall and share in approximately $63 million in earnings that will help them — and their parents — defray college expenses.

Many of them also are gaining valuable experience in jobs that they describe in some instances as “cool” or “just plain weird” — including one that lands them in prison.

Rather than being the result of criminal activities on the part of the Aggies, the prison gig is a matter of them helping prison inmates learn to lead upstanding lives after their release. Those students are part of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP), operated by Texas A&M’s Mays Business School as part of a national partnership of businesses and other universities. The students working with the program help to bring life transformation to inmates through entrepreneurial training and faith-based life skills classes. The students help, encourage and support the men in the PEP program.

PEP is one of several student jobs that focus on the service element, one of the university’s core values.

Among other unusual campus jobs are those that involve students who work at the Stevenson Companion Animal Life-Care Center, which is part of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biological Sciences at Texas A&M. They are hired to be “family” for a group of animals whose owners have either passed away or can no longer care for them. It is the students’ job to live at the center and take care of 21 cats, 15 dogs and a llama year round, including holidays. In addition to the tasks of feeding, medicating and cleaning, the students give the animals love and attention.

More than 200 Aggies work at 23 locations throughout Bryan and College Station community tutoring elementary students in reading and math as Reads & Counts tutors, and as such, they are part of a long-standing institutional commitment to community service. Organizers say these tutors make a huge impact on community because more than 80 percent of the youth in the area have the opportunity to work with a tutor.

While the children benefit, the Aggies gain valuable work experience, have opportunities for advancement to leadership positions and receive financial aid they have been awarded in the form of work study.

Students can also be found working in numerous labs across campus, monitoring and recording research projects or out at agricultural test sites where they collect samples and assess plants and soils. The researchers for whom the students work benefit, but so do the students via experiences that are often more valuable than the paychecks they receive.

Many of the campus jobs are more routine — they are office-oriented or involve working in such areas as food service or the library — but they still offer good learning experiences and provide valuable service to the university, says Delisa Falks, executive director of Scholarships & Financial Aid.

“The students who work on our campus help the university out tremendously,” notes Falks. “In many ways it is helping them develop themselves for their careers later in life.”

This is perhaps one of the many elements that make Aggie graduates appealing to employers.

“Employers tell us that the ethics and culture at Texas A&M translate into the kind of employees they want to hire,” says Paula Moses, director of employment services with the Texas A&M Career Center.

Students are assisted in their on-campus job searches by the Student Employment Office, which provides employment resources and professional development opportunities. Additionally, the Student Employment Office provides the human resources function for students and employers of students at Texas A&M, and it maintains an online job database. Also, it manages work-study programs and offers professional development workshops for students and supervisors of student employees.

Besides the estimated 10,000 students working on the Texas A&M campus — a volume that university officials say ranks among the most in the nation — numerous other Aggies work off campus.

In addition to ongoing acts of appreciation on the individual level, working students in Aggieland are honored each spring as part of the National Student Employment Week activities on campus, including the naming of the “Student Employee of the Year.” Selection for the award is based on a nomination process.

For more information, visit the Jobs for Aggies website. Click here for more on Student Employment Week and the Student Employee of the Year Award.