Would you rather work at Freddy’s frying food for eight hours on Saturday, getting paid minimum wage, or hang out and go to the movies with your friends? This is a challenge many students face when deciding whether or not to get a job.

Junior Garrett Hare has found a balance between his job and school by primarily working weekends. He also shared that he has learned and developed several skills including “customer service as a whole and the satisfaction of the people that come in,” as well as “handling money.”

Doug Rossier, the Financial Literacy teacher also talked about valuable skills you learn at a job and how students learn those skills in the real world. “Your parents teach you reliability,” but some skills you can’t learn until you’ve “really dealt with customers” and “unreasonable people,” Rossier shared. He also described how a job is in the real world and doesn’t have the safety of school. “You learn a lot about stuff you can’t learn in class,” he said. Rossier then listed some of the skills such as “being a team player and being responsible,” that students learn in real-world jobs.

However, senior Nadia McLaughlin shares the less enchanting side of working a job. McLaughlin, who works at a local fast-food restaurant, explained how she and her co-workers have experienced scheduling conflicts. McLaughlin said that her manager “will not work with her,” and that her co-workers feel like they are “not allowed to take the initiative.”

McLaughlin also said that one of the difficulties of a job could be how different it is from a classroom. “When we are at this age, a lot of the things we learn are built off of past knowledge.” She further elaborated by using the analogy that in school we learn Algebra 1 and then we build off of that knowledge in Algebra 2 and later math classes. Jobs create unique challenges in which students have to learn skills not taught in a traditional classroom, such as using a cash register.

Despite these difficulties, Rossier said that having a job in high school makes “you more employable” in future workplaces and gives students more to discuss when asked about their experience. Rossier emphasizes the idea that although he recommends a job as a teenager, school is more important. “If it impacts your grade at school negatively, that’s a downside,” and said that at the moment, students’ “number one job is school.”

Rossier gave advice to high school students looking for a job. “I’d say find a job that you think you might like,” adding how important it is that work shouldn’t come “at the expense of your school life.”