Upon coming to school, I knew that I would need a job that would be able to pay for rent, groceries, and other various living expenses throughout college. While I worked in numerous other positions, there was one that stood out amongst the rest. Waitressing has been one of the most challenging yet rewarding jobs that I have worked. It has taught me lifelong skills that I have learned to value such as critical thinking, proper decision making, customer service, and various others. It is the perfect job for a college student, not only teaching valuable lifelong skills, but it can also pay your bills as a student in college.
Subconsciously, I knew that waitressing was something that I was always interested in. While you learn lessons as a waitress, you must also come prepared to the job, prior to beginning. As a server, you must be able to communicate well. While this can be a skill that can potentially be acquired, serving may come much easier to you if you have natural communicative tendencies. Learning to be an exceptional communicator can be done through learning to serve. It has taught me how to communicate with all demographics to provide high quality service, in all aspects.
Before starting to serve, you must also accept failure. Like all things, serving will more than likely not be perfected on the first day, or even month. As a waiter or waitress, you will never stop learning. There are recurring continuous changes, such as menu alterations, variations in nightly specials, and overall cyclical restaurant modifications. All these changes provide the opportunity for learning to be continuous, not only challenging servers to be quick to learn, but also to be flexible. These continuous revisions require servers to always be learning new content at a very deep level of understanding. While a server must have knowledge of these changes, one must also be able to describe them, in detail, to customers upon request. As a server, but also as a student, these ever-changing details can be difficult to memorize. This is a key component of serving that many overlook. In this regard, serving is great at teaching quick and critical thinking, and challenges individuals to deliver content to customers in an organized and descriptive manner.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons that I have learned from being a waitress is time management. Here in Grand Forks, hockey season provides some extremely busy nights, oftentimes pushing servers, managers, and kitchen staff to their absolute limit. With this challenge, servers must be able to properly manage time to provide quality service and stay on top of the task at hand. This teaches time management in a way that I have never learned before. Time management is an extremely useful skill that can be carried into future long-term careers. Learning how to manage time in extreme task saturated environments has taught me to be a better student, pilot, and critical thinker.
Serving has taught me lifelong skills that have benefited me greatly, even since I started serving a few years ago. By pursuing a serving job, you must be willing to work hard, constantly learn, and potentially fail. While the lessons I mentioned are just a few that serving provides, there are many others that make serving one of the best jobs that I have ever had. Additionally, with serving, the reward of hard work is exceptional. I challenge you to work as a server to try something new, but maybe also to learn a lesson or two.
Sadie Blace is a Dakota Student General Reporter. She can be reached at [email protected].
