While you perfect your command of science or the liberal arts, you may earn good money and cultivate valuable skills by working in a restaurant.
The government has seen fit to violate long-standing British tradition and begin charging extortionate prices for the baccalaureate education that, until recently, cost you nothing. Now, in order to pay these outrageous fees, you must secure some sort of gainful employment. Your American counterparts very strongly recommend you carve out your niche in the food service industry. Three generations of distinguished American scholars willingly testify that no job better complements university study than a restaurant job.
School-friendly hours and respectable earnings
You study and meet with your Tutors during "regular business hours," the ones distinguished by daylight and intellectual productivity. The restaurant business, on the other hand, flourishes after dark, long after you have grown weary of the classics and your brain has shutdown in protest of over-use. A respectable dinner rush begins about 6p.m. and continues until a little after 9p.m., time you otherwise would devote to the BBC, rapt attention to football, or regaling the regular patrons at your favourite pub. In those three-and-a-half evening hours, you enjoy nearly unlimited profit-making potential, and you get a great deal of healthy exercise into the bargain. During an eight-hour shift, an experienced server can pocket more than £60 in tips-more if his or her clientele includes quite a few American tourists. Similarly, a reasonably experienced sous chef or broilerman earns approximately £30,000 annually-enough to elevate you out of the ranks of "starving student" or to pay for your organic chemistry textbook.
Valuable skills and free meals
First and foremost, most respectable restaurants allow you a free meal during your shift. Imagine the impact on your food budget!
Chefs inevitably learn to cook anything and everything quickly and precisely, and they learn the inestimable value of fine presentation. Even nourriture pour chien avec des nouilles (dog food with noodles) becomes a rare and exquisite delicacy when nicely garnished. Imagine how thrilled your unborn children will feel when you serve their grilled cheese sandwiches with radishes rendered as roses. Perhaps more importantly, experienced, imaginative chefs learn to craft genuinely appealing dishes from odd assortments of left-overs or whatever random ingredients are in the cupboards and refrigerator. This special skill transfers immediately and very effectively to home use, where meagre food supplies may be the norm. Similarly, when you rise to your proper position in society, you will need sophisticated etiquette to match your standing. You do not want to be mistaken for a Kardashian, do you? Experience as a server teaches all you ever will need to know about proper table settings and meal service. You will learn the exact placement for water goblets, wine glasses, dessert forks, and other exotic glass and silver ware. You will perfect proper wine service-a socialite essential; and you even will gain rudimentary command of your vintages. Of course, the virtues and values of professional bartending skills require neither justification nor elaboration.
Human Nature 101
If, as a result of your university study, you have begun to arrogate power, prestige, and privilege, your restaurant work quickly will restore your humility, quickly and irreversibly schooling you in the business of noblesse oblige. Your average patron probably will commend your initiative and venerate your knowledge, but he quickly will inquire, "What does Coleridge have to do with the fact my beef is over-cooked and my potato is as cold and hard as the moment it came from the ground?" Although you undoubtedly are well-prepared to deliver a brilliant retort, your position demands you apologize profusely and act quickly to redress your patron's complaints. The slippery floors and fragile glassware do not care that you rank near the top of your class; and they happily will upend or cut you with no reason or warning whatsoever.
University opens the entire universe to your processes of inquiry, encouraging ratiocination, rumination, and speculation. Restaurant work complements your intellectual efforts with harsh real-world experience. Hungry people are nasty and brutish. The average person is extremely demanding and not especially generous. When you complement your college education with work in a restaurant, you learn to appreciate the honour and privilege of higher education.
For a great means of earning extra money, look into Catering Recruitment and see what is out there for you.
