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The next week, I went back to HR for the weekly job listings and began calling the openings for which I was eligible. No one answered the phone. I left messages including contact information with some and tried calling back with others. I finally reached a live person who told me the individual I was calling for was out for lunch and to try again in a few hours. I called back in a few hours, only to listen to the phone ring endlessly.

The next day, someone else answered at the same number and told me to leave contact information, which I did, and that he would have the person I was looking for return my call. She didn’t. I did finally manage to contact one person who was helpful and polite, and set up an interview. Unfortunately, she called me back to let me know that she had filled the position. I was semi-pleasedčshe had called me back, something no one else had bothered doing.

At the end of my second week of job hunting, I hadn’t even had a chance to interview. I began week three in my aggravating hunt for employment feeling quite discouraged, but I refused to give up. I began calling again. The first couple of attempts to talk with a live person were fruitless. However, shortly I was quite surprised to find someone answer the phone and offer to meet with me. With some trepidation, given my previous experiences, I agreed to meet her the next day. The appointed time came, I went to her office, interviewed, and got the job. A happy ending to an exasperating, three-week job hunt.

However, rather than accept that I finally acquired a position and forget the trials I went through to do so, I asked around to see if my experience was somehow abnormal. Several others reported similar experiences trying to get work study jobs. I am very happy with the job I finally got, but it seems to me that there is definitely something wrong here on campus.

Why do so many offices not have anyone available to answer phones, and why did almost no one return my calls? I usually called in the early to mid afternoon, so perhaps some of the offices were staffed by faculty who had classes. Or maybe there aren’t enough people employed to answer the phones, and they were hiring students to rectify this. But that still doesn’t explain why almost no one called back. Did someone pass around a memo banning Hamline employers from taking two minutes to call interested students back to say, “I’m sorry, the position has been filled”?

Our collective experiences demonstrate a shortcoming which reflects poorly on the university.

I propose that at some time, for instance the first week of classes every semester, Hamline orchestrate an on-campus job fair. Allow prospective work study employers to take leave of their offices for a few hours and encourage them to sit at a table and interview prospective student workers on the spot. This would mean there would be no need for students to deal with the frustration of making countless calls, and employers wouldn’t have to worry about bothering to return students’ calls.

This is one suggestion; certainly there are other possibilities. What’s clear is that obtaining a campus job is unnecessarily difficult, and that Hamline needs to address this problem.