Remembering All My Jobs - Part III

So after graduating, they aren't called summer jobs anymore. They are just jobs.

Part III - working abroad and coming back and working abroad again.

I added a Latin American studies minor my last year of college, and I could get credits in a study abroad program. I managed to take my semester abroad when I had concluded the rest of my courses back in the US. In addition, when I got my student visa for Brazil, instead of granting me 6 months they granted me a whole year, even though I was only studying there for a semester. This coincided with some car issues back home, so I made it my goal to save money and also find a job while I was over there so that I could stay longer, through the end of my visa.

One day talking with my Sociology professor, when I had mentioned I was looking for a job when school ended he said he could give me some part-time work working in his lab. He was an archaeologist, and needed help re-classifying and re-organizing some old material, some of it dating back from when he got his doctorate. Most of the time I was just by myself in the lab, but once he invited me to come with his group on a project. He basically had to go in and review a very large area not far from the Argentina border where they were going to be putting a dam and power plant. This was a super cool experience, and I still remember him blasting Amy Winehouse in his jeep on the way to the site every morning.

After I left Brazil, I came back to New Orleans. I needed a full time job quick in order to be able to rent an apartment, etc. I ended up doing really well on my interview with Avis. The training was 6 whole weeks. They were really keen on us being 'salespeople' not rental agents in the traditional sense. There was alot of pressure to do upsells and convince people to buy extras like insurance. There was a commission structure that incentivized this. Of all my jobs I have ever had, I think the funniest group of people I worked with was at Avis. The customers could be extremely difficult - our rental office was at the airport so all the stress around travel was compounded with everything that could go wrong with renting cars. But even when the customers were upset or mean, all of the people working got along great. Pretty sure our very ancient system was using Amadeus, which I had never heard of before of course.

After that, I got a part-time gig working at a small marketing agency downtown. I helped with email blasts and a couple brochure design projects. However I still needed to work full-time. So, I got a job at the Hotel Monteleone. I was aiming to work at the carousel bar but ended up working at the rooftop bar. The customers were great, and it was really fun to give people recommendations for things to do in the city. I met a lot of interesting people. I think this might go for a lot of hotels, but you have all the various hospitality departments: housekeeping, bartenders, servers, parking attendants, etc. The real "in" is when you can get introduced to the banquet department, because that is where the real money is made. Working weddings was especially fun and easy.

I decided I needed a more adult job and worked for about a year at an insurance company. When the time came to move up in the company, that meant studying for my insurance license in order to be a salesperson. I realized I didn't want do that and started looking for something else more relevant to my interests and skill set.

Since I was still fluent in Portuguese thanks to my time in Brazil, I found a job across Lake Ponchatrain for a satellite phone company as a call center agent. I needed to attend calls in English and Portuguese. Since we were taking over the Portuguese customer support from their Brazilian call center, I ended up learning a lot about the company and the industry. I got to go to Panama and meet with the Brazilian team lead, and basically since she didn't speak English it was our job to document every process and procedure that she did so that we could replicate it in the US. The job itself was great, and like with Avis, sometimes the customers who called us could be very difficult, but there was a great atmosphere with our team so any bad energy dissolved quickly.

After this, I decided to leave New Orleans. I saved up to take some time off to go backpacking, with the plan to work and travel in South America if I could swing it. Then, maybe I could think about if I wanted to go back for my Masters or whatever my next step in my career would be. I ended up getting a job teaching English in Brazil, in São Paulo. In exchange for giving lessons we were given a place to stay, a phone, and meals. This allowed me to prolong my stay in Brazil and return to Florianopolis to visit in the summer.

In Brazil, I got into a relationship which eventually brought me to Lima, Peru. I continued teaching English - I found a few contacts online that gave classes to businesses in offices around the city. Most of my students had pretty strong English and alot of them just wanted weekly conversation lessons. I made enough to pay my bills and got to travel Peru a bit. One of my last groups I taught were programmers, more or less my age, working for Verizon. After talking to them, I realized learning to code was alot like learning a language, and I was hooked. I had always enjoyed building websites since middle school, but never considered computer science as a career. I looked up coding bootcamps and eventually enrolled in The Iron Yard in Atlanta. There was a class close to my parents house. And well, the rest is history.