Beyond Selidor

I grew up in an upper middle class town just outside of Boston (in high school in the first half of the 90s). It was common for people in my town to do things like babysitting (once or twice a week, usually rotating between a small number of families) but less common to have a steady part-time job at a business (more common if there was a family business).

Once people were old enough (16 or 17 depending on the job), there were a lot of summer jobs often related to younger kids (lifeguard, summer camp counsellor, summer jobs wherever the family traditionally spent the summer).

In my case, my father was seriously ill from the time I was 13, and died just after I turned 15 (and working before turning 16 would have been more legally complicated), and then when I was 16-18, I was in boarding school during the school year, and working wasn't an option. But none of my friends in that period routinely had steady part-time jobs (I think all of us did some amount of babysitting, a few did tutoring, etc.)

Interestingly, my boarding school had a requirement that everyone do a couple of hours at some sort of part time job equivalent, in order to make sure we felt some responsibility for our spaces and understood that the custodians and other staff were also humans.

My first year, it was helping the custodian in the English building with tasks that didn't require specialised tools - cleaning blackboards, dusting and polishing wood, cleaning windows, sweeping before he did stuff with the larger floor cleaner. My senior year, it was being a dorm proctor in my dorm, which took way more time. We also all had to do a week a couple of times a year on dish duty (which convinced me that a) I wanted to be very nice to anyone else ever having to do dish duty, and b) I would go a long way to avoid needing to take a job that involved that routinely. I had a much worse grasp on the way that smells and my migraines play badly together sometimes then.)

Other jobs involved things like shelving in the library (or being the evening clerk on duty for very responsible people), etc.

All of which meant I didn't work before I got to college outside of that. And at college, jobs on campus gave priority to work study students (which I wasn't), and jobs outside of that tended to be difficult to coordinate with coursework (especially since one of my majors was music, which had a fair number of evening rehearsals or 'go listen to this concert' requirements.) And anything other than the town the college was in (a 10-20 minute walk, depending where you started on campus) involved probably a car or negotiating a sometimes tricky college bus schedule and parking was severely limited on campus. (Also, I didn't get my license until my senior year in college, but that's a separate problem.)

So my friends who worked generally had work study (library, food service, IT), but it was on campus, and usually in the 10 hours a week sort of range.

I got my first job between junior and senior years in college (doing tech projects for staff on campus), that then turned into my first paid job the next summer (because one of the people hiring for that remembered me. She was an absolute delight, and part of the reason I went to library school. She was also the government docs librarian as well as being the college webmistress. You can tell it was the 90s because 'College Webmistress' was only about half of her job, there was me, and I think there was someoen doing web stuff for administration, and other than that, part of what I did was train department admins how to update syllabi.)