Valerie Holmes

While attending college in Prescott, I had three different jobs with the university. I started out working with Upward Bound, a program that helps underprivileged students meet the requirements necessary to graduate high school and go on to college. A lot of students in this program are the first in their families to aspire to go to college, and some are the first in many years to even graduate from high school. From June 2007 - June 2008 I was a tutor, going to the local high schools to assist students with their homework and even hosting sessions online to help students remotely in the evenings. In June 2008, I became a Residential Assistant and I lived with a group of 10 girls in the dorms at Embry-Riddle. 

During the summer session, students attended classes taught by college professors for high school and college credit. I was involved with supervision of the students in the entire program, tutoring students, organizing group activities, and helping the students with any other problems they had. Many of them had never been away from home for more than a couple of nights, and most had certainly never been away from home for over 2 months, so homesickness was very common. The program culminates with an exciting trip to California where we toured college campuses, took students to the beach (most of them had never been to the ocean), and even got to go to Six Flags Magic Mountain. 

This was an outstanding experience for me. I was able to tutor students and watch them grow immensely in a very short period of time and while I was used to tutoring throughout high school, there was something different about these students. They were extremely appreciative and actually wanted to learn! This program showed me that teaching is something that I could definitely do with my life. All good things come to an end though and my third year of college was just about to start at the end of August 2008 so I decided a break from working was needed. It didn't last long though and in January of 2009, I started a new job at the library on campus. 

I was hired in the Technical Services department of the Christine and Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Library, working on processing new books, updating databases, and reorganizing and restoring the special collections room. This job definitely required a certain attention to detail which is something I have always been able to embrace with ease. The many projects I worked on kept things interesting and funnily enough, the project I took the most pride in while working here was replacing every single label on every single book in the library. If I remember correctly, there is something like 10,000 books in that library so it was a huge project. The pride came from knowing that I was helping students to be able to identify the book they are looking for more quickly, saving them time that they could be using to do actual research. While I was working at the library, budget cuts happened and my hours were cut back so I decided to take on a second job with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide Instructional Design and Development (that's a mouthful!). 

I talk quite a bit about that position in my ERAU Worldwide page, so I'll keep this to what I got out of that position. If I thought working at the library used my ability to pay close attention to details, I was wrong. This job was tedious at times, but I had a lot of training and was able to pick up the skills necessary to excel fairly quickly. This job made me feel a lot of pressure to succeed, but none of it was coming from my boss. I knew that the courses I was working on were going to be seen by students all over the world so I wanted to make sure I was helping the University to publish the best courses possible. I ended this position when I graduated college and while I can't say it was the best job I had at the University, it certainly turned out to be the most important! All of these jobs taught me varying skills that all helped shape my work ethic into what it is today. Many students don't work during college, and I think that's a huge mistake. This is where you get the opportunity to work with other adults, determine what skills you have (and which ones you need to improve upon), and figure out what you really want to do once you do graduate.