Work You Love (Mary Strand)

This month at YA Outside the Lines, we're supposed to talk about first jobs and first bosses. Since we're young adult authors and theoretically write for a teenage audience (but if you're an adult who doesn't read YA, you're missing out), I'm guessing for many people these would be high school jobs.

I never had a job until college. When I was in high school, without my even raising the question (although I was thinking about it), my mom said I couldn't possibly work in high school, since I already had a nearly full-time job as an athlete.

Everyone should have a mom like that.

But I DID spend all my time playing sports. In the summers, I played tennis five hours a day, plus several weekend tournaments, and basketball another two hours a day. I couldn't easily have done anything more. On the other hand, I was always broke. My mom didn't pay me for my sports "job," so maybe she WASN'T all that. ha ha!

In college, it was time to work. I usually worked 30 hours a week, and one semester it went up to 70 hours a week, all while going to school.

I started with "work-study" jobs, which were a form of financial aid. (Yes, my early life was mostly broke!) But here were my three main college jobs, two of which were work-study: (1) acting as an usher at concerts and sports events, (2) working in the Instructional Media Center at the college library (which included a lot of free time reading children's books, which was actually a blast), and (3) cocktail waitressing and bartending at Brat Kabin, which featured live music three nights a week.

Totally by accident, last month I wrote about my boss at the library, who also hung out at Brat Kabin, resulting in a major collision of my two main worlds.

So my main three college jobs involved sports, music, and books. After a lengthy stint practicing law, I wound up working in the worlds of music and books. And I still love and play sports.

Do what you love, peeps!

The semester that I worked 70 hours a week (plus college classes) was when I got a full-time job managing the Democratic party headquarters for Eau Claire County in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I kept my cocktail waitressing job (hello! free music and drinks!), so I was insanely tired that whole semester. Luckily, I was a political science major, taking a lot of poli sci classes, so let's just say that my poli sci professors cut me an amazing amount of slack that semester.

Everyone should have professors like that.

My point, although I'm not sure I have one, is that it's the best thing in the world if you can find jobs you love. It's not always easy, and sometimes it's not possible, so I know how lucky I am. But I had zero work experience when I started college, and I just went after jobs that followed my interests. I did that as a lawyer, too: as a result, I was the only lawyer in my firm who practiced in the areas of tax, securities, AND mergers & acquisitions. I thought they were all fun, and I'm all about doing everything I love, often all at once.

No wonder I'm still tired all the time!

Mary Strand is the author of Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras and three other novels in the Bennet Sisters YA series. You can find out more about her books and music at marystrand.com.