Finding an On-Campus Job

Everybody knows being a college student can be expensive. Before arriving on campus, many incoming students wonder what they’ll do to make money during the year -- I know I did! Luckily, there are plenty of student employment opportunities at Barnard. Navigating the job-finding process can seem a bit intimidating from a distance. In reality, though, it’s pretty simple as long as you know where to look.

The first question to answer when looking for an on-campus job is where you’re actually eligible to work. This largely depends on your financial aid status. Students with Federal Work Study awards will be eligible to work at both Barnard and Columbia. Students with a Barnard College Job award are only eligible to work at Barnard, and students with no award can work at Barnard after a two-week priority hiring period each semester. Regardless of which campus you’re on and what award you have, there is a wide variety of opportunities to choose from. This blog post will focus on Barnard jobs.

With so many choices, finding the right job for you could potentially be a confusing process. Luckily, Barnard has resources in place to assist with on-campus employment. Beyond Barnard, our career advising center, hosts workshops on finding on-campus jobs, and Barnard employers are present at many of our career fairs. To streamline the job-search process, most (but not all, as you’ll see later) of the applications for these positions are all consolidated in one database: BarnardWorks. This is a simple process that rarely requires more than a resume and a cover letter. The positions that do require outside applications are slightly more specialized but are well-advertised and fundamentally user-friendly processes.

So, what jobs are actually available? Far too many to list here! For the sake of giving an idea of the variety of opportunities, I’ll name a few, but keep in mind that new positions arise all the time and that every single on-campus job would never fit into a single blog post. Students can work in many of the different offices on campus, from working as an Admissions Representative in the Office of Admissions (like me!) or working in the office of Residential Life. Jobs also exist in different centers on campus -- in the Milstein Center’s Design Center, for example, or in the Empirical Reasoning Center for lovers of data. Research positions are frequently available in Barnard’s academic departments. If you love writing or public speaking, you can apply to be a Writing or Speaking Fellow and help students improve their writing and speaking skills. Finally, students who need a low-commitment job should consider being a part of Barnard Babysitting or Barnard Bartending. Babysitters attend an information session and can then babysit for parents who request Barnard babysitters, and bartenders pass a class to be eligible for bartending jobs.

The best part about working at Barnard is that everyone you work with understands that you’re a student. I’ve found that it’s much easier for me to find an appropriate work/school balance in college than in high school. My high school employers worked with so many non-students that they wouldn’t always remember that I had classes to go to and homework to do. Here, there’s a strong effort on the part of employers to be flexible with hours and supportive when it comes to managing workloads. Working at Barnard can be a fun and fulfilling experience -- it certainly is for me. And thanks to the amount of options and the streamlined processes, it’s not nearly as hard as you may think to get started.

Newly hired Barnard tour guides getting ready to shadow a tour!