Runing head: INTERVIEW ON INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS WORK ON CAMPUS

Interview about Work on Campus and International Students

Lingjun Chen
Purdue University

INTERVIEW ON FOREIGN STUDENTS WHO WORK ON CAMPUS

Abstract
This paper focused on exploring the issue of whether it is beneficial for international
student to sacrifice their spare time to work. I interviewed my friend Hou, who is a senior
and also one of the student supervisors at Earhart dinning court, to have a further
understanding on my research topic. I believe Hou was credible since he had worked at
Earhart dinning court for over 4 years and he had been promoted three times during this
period of time. Through interviewing, Hou shared his work experiences and personal
opinions with me in order to answer my questions and the interview was fairly successful.
I then interviewed Le, a PhD student major in IE and also the teaching assistant for IE
386. Le provided a large amount of information and personal ideas that contributing to
my research topic and my final paper. My posy interview conclusion was that it is
advantageous for international student to find a part time job because it not only gives
students financial supports, but also improves their characters and working skills that are
invaluable for their future careers.
Key words: international students, jobs on campus, beneficial for future career,
financial support.

INTERVIEW ON FOREIGN STUDENTS WHO WORK ON CAMPUS

Interview On Relationship Between Scholarship And International Students

With increasingly number of people are interested in applying scholarship as
international students in order to offload their financial burden on account of the high
expense of studying abroad, I decided to research on this topic to find out the answer for
previous questions listed in my formal proposal. However, due to scholarships are
unavailable for international students at Purdue, I shifted my attention to another form of
financial aid, work opportunities on campus, which support many international students
financially at present. Nevertheless, new questions were generated as I changed my
research topic. Is it beneficial for international students to sacrifice their spare time to
work? How do students balance their work time and time to study? In students' views, do
their salaries worth of the time they have spent? etc. Based on these questions, I picked
two people as my interviewees.
The first person I picked, Hou, is a friend of mine. He is a senior major in accounting
and double management right now and is one of the student supervisors in Earhart
Dinning Court. The reasons I chose him to interview were his expertise in working at the
dinning court and his excellence of working history. Hou applied for student associates at
Earhart dinning court as a freshman in 2011. Through four years of hard working, Hou
was promoted three times and elected students worker of the month ten times. Therefore,
Hou's four years of working experiences and fantastic working records made him
authoritative for my research topic.
I conducted my interview with Hou on the night of Oct. 24th. However, I did not

INTERVIEW ON FOREIGN STUDENTS WHO WORK ON CAMPUS

start my interview immediately with him for he just finished his work shift and I could
see tiredness in his eyes. So I asked him if he would like to have the interview right now
or to take a short break. He said he was fine and, before I asked any questions, started
introduce all the different sections in Earhart to me. There is dish section where worker's
main jobs are washing dishes, food service sections where workers bring up all kinds of
food for customers, and table sections which employees wipe and clean the tables. Hou
told me his job was mainly supervising every section and make sure all employees knew
their duties and all sections were functioning well. After Hou's introduction, I asked him
about how much time he worked in a week and how much did he get pay for an hour of
working. He said he works three shifts a week, which was approximately 12 hours, and
his salary was 7.50 bucks per hour. However, He told me that he was a little unsatisfied
with his payment. He said at first he was fairly happy with his salary, but after being
promoted three times, he found out that his salary only went up 75 cents per hour. And
because student supervisor are busier than normal student employees, he was frustrated
with the amount of time he sacrificed for work in return of such poor payment. But when
I asked him that whether it is worth it to keep working and sacrificing his spare time to
work, his response was firm and clear. Yes! It is worth it! He explained that even though
money was not ideally good, it still covered his living costs and he stopped asking money
from his parents from that point. He took a few seconds, closed his eyes, and seemed to
let his memory flash back. Then he smiled to me and said that the sense of fulfillment
that finally he was standing on his own two feet was the greatest feeling he had ever felt.

INTERVIEW ON FOREIGN STUDENTS WHO WORK ON CAMPUS

Furthermore, Hou pointed out that salary was not the most important thing a student
employee was receiving from working. The invaluable things were the work experiences
one have had and skills one have learnt through working. For example, Hou defined
himself as lazy and passive prior to his job at Earhart. He said that he always waited till
the last minute to finish all his homework. However, working at the dinning court
changed his character. Because he had to work swiftly and efficiently in order to receive
compliments from the student coordinator in order to get promotion, he did not have a
choice to procrastinate anymore. I remembered Hou appeared to be extremely happy
when he told me that after a month of working at the dinning court, he realized that he
started to finish his homework 2 to 3 days ahead of the deadline and his grades were
actually improved! Besides, Hou mentioned that student's social skills and managing
skills were trained thus improved through working as well. Time flew by and I had
interviewed Hou for over 40 minutes. So I decided to close out my interview with my last
questionHow do you think your work experience can be related or contributed to your
future career? He thought for a while, his left hand fingertip was drawing something in
his right hand palm like he was writing down the answer, and then he said
I think my work experience here prepared me to be a better candidate for
plenty of jobs, because I learnt the hardcore of being a successful worker, which is
devotion and diversity. For that I mean, work is a commitment that one made so one
should devote him/her self in to the work instead of considering to quit the job when
there are a few setbacks or tough times appeared at work. Positive working attitude is

INTERVIEW ON FOREIGN STUDENTS WHO WORK ON CAMPUS

essential for any kinds of work in my perspective. And by diversity I mean one ought
to try different positions even if it is not your expertise. The reason is by doing so,
one could arm oneself with all kinds of skills that could handle any situation
happened during work. And usually, if one wants to be a manager, he/she has to
know pretty much every position's work duty. So I think my work experience has
definitely helped me with my future career."
I interviewed my second interviewees the next day. His name is Le, a PhD student in
the Industrial Engineering major and is currently the teaching assistant of the course IE
386. I believed that he was credible for he had been the TA of this class for the past 2
years and he had a fantastic reputation among his students. We agreed to meet at the
Starbucks on the basement of PMU for our interview and I had to say the atmosphere
there was great for interviewing. He told me that normally he worked around 10 hours a
week and his hourly payment was 20 bucks per hour. Nonetheless, he pointed out that he
actually worked exceed 10 hours per week because ha had to prepare teaching materials
for the class in his private time. His job was mainly focused on guiding students in the
computer lab, teaching them how to use scientific methodology in engineering, and
answering their questions. I then asked him what were the advantages and disadvantages
of being a TA? He took a sip of coffee then said:
There are many benefits for being a TA. For example, graduate students who
become TAs do not have to pay their tuition anymore and you get paid 20 bucks an
hour, which is not bad at all. Moreover, teaching in a class helps you become expert

INTERVIEW ON FOREIGN STUDENTS WHO WORK ON CAMPUS

of the stuff you teach. Like me, I mostly teach students how to use some computer
software to do research so I have to be an expert to those software before I could
teach my students. On the other hand, the disadvantages of TA would be working as
a TA takes a considerable amount of time off your research time, and for graduate
students, researches are their top priorities."
I was satisfied with his answer so I moved on to my next question, which was
whether it was worth it to take this job? Le seemed to be happy that I asked him this
question. He said:
Yes, being a TA was one of the worthiest decisions I had ever made. Even though
it took you a lot of time out of a week to work, you don't have to worry about tuition
or living costs because your work privilege and work payment covered those all.
More importantly, by being a TA, you are giving yourself a chance to learn or
improve plenty of valuable skills, such as managing skill and public speech skill, that
you could not learn or practice inside of the class." My last interview question for Le
was to ask him to give some tips for the future TA candidates. He pointed out TAs
had to be patient and arm themselves with adequate amount of knowledge in order to
help students with their questions. In addition, he said: "If a TA is assigned to create
homework for students, make sure to set the format for the homework so there are no
confusions for the students.
In conclusion, I enjoined my time with my two interviewees overall and I absolutely
had a deeper understanding and a wider range of knowledge on the issues related to

INTERVIEW ON FOREIGN STUDENTS WHO WORK ON CAMPUS

students working on campus. Based on my interview and research, my conclusion was

that international students generally have high acceptances on their jobs. More
specifically, students normally think working on campus is beneficial for them not only
for their salaries but more significantly, the work experiences and other skills they may
acquire through working. These work experiences and skills can be essential for
international students future career. I am grateful to my two interviewees for cooperating
with me and providing considerable amount of valuable information that enriched my
research with different fields of knowledge and perspectives.