c/o Vasilia Yordanova
I have always known I would work throughout college. The days of using my parents’ money to go out for lunch with my friends or buy a new sweater would be over. Living 50 minutes from my high school and keeping up with a constant stream of homework, volunteering, school newspaper, and so on, I never worked in high school.
After graduating, I applied to jobs at ice cream shops, salad bars, yoga studios, and cafés in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, and was faced with a slew of nothing. I received one response (from Sweetgreen), and then got a rejection email three weeks after my interview. At that point, I had given up on making money over the summer, but come August, I was once again determined.
After looking through on-campus jobs on Handshake and seeing that many required resumes and cover letters, I decided to play it safe and apply to jobs off-campus as well. I spent a few afternoons switching between Google Maps and my email, then sat back and waited. Once again, I received a single response from Neil’s Donuts. I had an interview! I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high, though, remembering Sweetgreen’s painful rejection a month earlier.
The day of my interview also happened to be my first time actually being at Wesleyan, following a red-eye flight and a layover in Chicago. My dad and I got caught up walking around campus until I was going to be late, and when I returned to our rental car to retrieve the resume I had printed and packed the day before, I found it drenched in water. With no resume in hand and no idea what kind of questions a donut shop would ask me (not to mention I was at that point very sweaty—the humidity here is no joke!), I speed-walked to Neil’s and arrived right on time.
Somehow, I ended up getting hired, and a little while later, following my first week of classes, there I was, clocking into my first shift of anything ever. The first hour was incredibly stressful. Mastering the art of stacking different donuts into boxes so that they don’t get squished and the fillings don’t leak out, learning to use the register and give customers the right change, and remembering “two bacon egg and cheeses, one on a hard roll, toasted, one on a jalapeno cheddar bagel also toasted, a sausage egg and cheese on a hard roll, toasted, and a ham egg and cheese on a croissant” to put into the register while making three different coffees and then packing half a dozen donuts again—all of it was, and still is, challenging for me.
At the same time, I remind myself: This is a relatively easy job. I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining. I had had an overwhelming evening before my first day of work, and I showed up still feeling anxious and very tired. I left work covered in cinnamon sugar with bits of glaze in my hair, hungry, and over-caffeinated (giving me access to free coffee is dangerous)—but in a wonderful mood. In the span of a few hours, my perspective had completely changed.
As a freshman, I rarely venture off campus and sometimes forget that there is a whole world out there. Wesleyan really is a bubble, and walking just 10 minutes off campus and standing behind the counter at Neil’s pulls me out of it for six hours each week. In college, your fellow students and your professors are the only people you see for days at a time. For many students at Wesleyan and other similar schools, the chance to attend college has been taken for granted their whole life. It’s the same for me—with immigrant parents who always valued education above pretty much everything, and coming from a high school where nearly everyone goes to college (and many to great colleges), there was never a question of if I would go to college, just where I would go and what I would study.
Since the majority of my interactions are with other college students, it’s easy to forget that college is not the norm. Thirty-eight percent of people in the United States over the age of 25 had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This number is increasing constantly, but it is still less than half of the population. Every student at Wesleyan worked hard to be here—I am not denying that—but college education is still a gift and a privilege, and it is important to remember that, especially when school becomes difficult. My first day of work at Neil’s was an important reminder of this gratitude and perspective. It may seem obvious, and I am definitely revealing my own self-absorption. If you do not need this reminder, I commend you—but I certainly did.
Working off campus, especially at Neil’s, has plenty of other benefits, too: Making tips, bringing free donuts to my dorm building at the end of each shift, and engaging a completely different part of my brain compared to readings and French grammar exercises. But most of all, I appreciate the opportunity to fully immerse myself in my new community and interact with all kinds of people.
Vasilia Yordanova is a member of the class of 2027 and can be reached at vyordanova@wesleyan.edu.