Becoming professionals

It never ceases to surprise me how much my life has changed over the years. I used to be a high schooler waiting for the moment I could get a driver’s license; and here I am, several years later, about to graduate college and enter the workforce.

I’ve been working at Baumer of America, a business in my hometown, for a few years now whenever I have extra time, and I’ve developed a lot during my time there. It took me all these years to realize that I’m a professional now. People defer to my judgement, ask me for help, and work with me on projects. I have become somebody who knows what they’re doing, which is a strange sensation. A lot of the time, I feel as though I shouldn’t be the authority on something, but that seems to be the way things have turned out at that job.

There’s also a certain level of responsibility associated with working on something. When you’re working on a big project and it has to get done by a certain date, you have to put in the extra hours in order to get the job done. When we were about to go live with our new company resource management software, my supervisor and I had to spend a week of what would normally have been both of our winter breaks inputting new companies into the system. It’s nobody’s fault that it ended up that way, but we had a job, and we got it done on time.

Another thing that I’ve learned is that I always want to do my job in a way that I can be proud of. Anything that I work on should be something that I would be glad to present to my colleagues, whether they see it or not.

In the span of a few years, I’ve learned so much, but to my suprise, very little of what I’ve learned has been from classes. Occasionally there’s been a good class or two that’s a magical combination of interesting, important, and challenging, but these are few and far between. Instead, most of what I’ve gained at college has been from clubs and friends. Talking about code with my roommates and studying with my friends have been some of the most academically rewarding things I’ve done at Stevens.

Going beyond purely technical work, working on a variety of e-boards for different clubs has taught me a lot about leadership. I understand the underpinnings of what is required to manage different kinds of organizations, and I learn more every day.

But all of these things make me wonder what I’ll learn next. I couldn’t imagine how far these past few college years would take me, and I still can’t imagine where the first few years of life in the industry will take me. I hope that my time working will be as productive as my time at college, if not more so, but it’s hard to say for sure. Life takes us down unpredictable paths, and sometimes we just need to follow through and do our best to make the most out of it.

Senioritis is an Opinion column written by one or two Stevens student(s) in their last year of study to discuss life experiences during their final year at Stevens, and other related subject matter.