Here’s an interesting fact you may not know (or to be fair, even find interesting). The American expression “my two cents” is actually just an Americanised version of the original British idiom “my two pennies worth.” Yep much like whisky and invading less powerful countries, the phrase is just another concept that actually came from the British Isles and was merely imitated by the United States.
So, given many of us are soon to be or indeed have started graduate jobs, I thought I would throw in experiences and thoughts given I have been working for over a month now on the off chance it is helpful but mainly because I am guessing I can score a few cheap jokes somewhere in this post.
It really is a lot of the things you imagine to be honest. You know when we were doing things like normalised databases and understanding business processes before designing a system and we’re all sat there thinking this clearly is a better way of doing this but nobody is going to be doing this in the real world and because I know this it’s then going to be my job to have to go in and sort it all out which is just going to be painful.
Well, that is exactly how it is :D. Having arrived for my first week by boss Nick announced he was going to be away for the next week so I used the time to almost entirely rewrite a big system we had written for a client so it is all normalised and doesn’t duplicate silly amounts of code (it now only duplicates a large amount of code ;)). But it’s far less painful to actually sort out – it’s more of a fun challenge once you actually get into it.
You’re going to like the people you work with. Possibly because they geniunely nice people. I think I’ve got lucky in that the people I work with really are geniunely nice people. Even if they weren’t though, you are still going to like them because it’s like that in halls – you make friends and then looking back a year or two later you realise that they were actually a right bunch of losers.
The first week or so you haven’t really got into the swing of things so they can be a bit boring while you really build up the knowledge to just be able to walk in on a morning and get on with things. So if there is some serious clock watching in that first week, don’t worry, it’s going to get better once you’re up to speed.
Chances are, you aren’t going to be a newbie for too long. Most of the companies we are going for will have a relatively high turnover compared with companies outside of IT and not recruiting graduates who are going places so with all probability there will be someone else who started just before you and will soon be someone newer than you too. My company recruited a few months before I started and have some else starting in about two weeks.
Things happen slowly. This is where your experience running societies comes in. Remember all that nagging of people to get things done that a president has to do constantly throughout their term? It is a skill that will come in handy a lot. If you missed out on the experience of running a society then don’t worry too much, you’re just going to feel far less flustrated when nothing gets done.
Finally, whenever you get stressed, just remember that you only have 40 years of work left. And a good few years of people telling you that joke. Over and over. Like Thursday crashing a car. So yeah, good luck!