Blog Assignment #3: Mentor Interview

To my DP!!

^click this to read on my digital portfolio

I remember the office being cold, not that that was at all different from the other sixteen days I had been in Ann Arbor. The temperature since December 1^st had been a cool 25 degrees. Walking into my workspace was no consolation, however—the heater was busted, allowing the winter chill to creep across the tile and onto my unsuspecting arms. I shivered. I was already incredibly nervous as I prepared the questions for this interview, and that freezing air wasn’t helping. Slowly, I repeated my questions back to myself as my mentor walked into the room. 9:30, as usual. Camera in hand, I approached my mentor.

“Is it alright if I ask you a few questions?” I heard myself ask as I reviewed my questions once more for good measure. She removed her thick windbreaker and draped it over the chair, replacing it with a smaller, thinner sweatshirt. I thought of my own ignorance and scolded myself for forgetting my own. She agreed to my proposal, and pulled up a chair in the middle of the room. I set up the small camera on a printer, pulled up my own desk chair and began.

K: Good morning, Cara. Today I’m going to be interviewing you about your job here and getting some background information about you. So you attended college at Eastern Michigan?

C: Yes.

K: For four years?

C: Yes, for four years. I also went to JCC for a little bit but I ended up getting my degree at EMU. I worked there as a staff member in the physical plant for 6 years and as a benefit of being an employee I got college credits taken care of. While I worked I attended school and ended up finishing my degree at Eastern.

K: And your degree is in…?

C: Business management.

K: What were some of your previous jobs?

C: Well right out of school I began working at Jacobson’s stores in their corporate office. Jacobson’s is equivalent to a Nordstrom or a Macy’s. They’re closed now, but I worked in the buying office. I was assistant buyer to one of the buyers there but basically she would go to New York, pick out clothes for the stores and write out what we decided to buy. I was in charge of placing the orders and making sure things were right when they came to the warehouse. I worked there for about two years. Then I got married and moved out towards Ann Arbor. I didn’t want to have a commute anymore so I looked into getting a job out this way. I was able to get a job at Eastern Michigan, where I worked for 6 years. I started out in the history and philosophy department, and then moved to the social work department then over to the physical plant, which was an upgrade. While I was there I worked for various different areas and ended up getting advanced to the administrative director’s assistant. I was in charge of the plumbing and HVC departments.

K: So you managed all these departments?

C: Mhm, I was basically in charge of all the paperwork. It was similar to what we do here [at Michigan Power Rodding]. We took calls from students in their dorms, then we would distribute out our workers to go take care of the problems. The plumbing director at EMU actually uses our company for jobs that they can’t handle. Since I had worked there and the director thought I was a really good employee, I had kind of explained to him that I was looking for something else—Eastern Michigan wasn’t really the place for me

Kyle: "What is different about working at a regular job as opposed to being a college student?"

Cara: "I think you feel a lot more responsibility...when you're in college, you might not want to get up and go to class and you could probably get away with that. But, as an adult with a family, you have people that rely on you. Even if you feel like you need that snooze bar, you can't do that because no one's going to do the work for you. You have to take the responsibility to come every day and do your job and do it to the best of your capability. Prove yourself, because in the long run the more you work, the more chances there are for advancement in your career."

K: And you’ve worked at Michigan Power Rodding for 3 years?

C: Well, I’ve only had the official title of office manager for about 6 months, but yes I’ve worked here for about 3 years.

K: "So what are some of the day-to-day challenges you face when working with your colleagues?"

C: "Well, being a manager, one of the biggest challenges is keeping people motivated. Some of the tasks that the other girls do here are repetitive and can be pretty boring and if they're not motivated to do the work doesn't get done. And when you have to talk to someone about the work not getting done it's hard to do it in a manner that isn't angry with them to the point where they're not going to want to do it, but you still need to be firm enough to let them know that this does need to get done. I think dealing with the attitudes of people that just don't care can be really hard because you can tell them five times to do something, and then they don't so you have to write them up. When you use disciplinary action against them they get angry with you and I think that's one of the hardest things to deal with."

K: And what about when working with customers?

C: I think just trying to calm them down sometimes. They don’t necessarily understand what their problem is, or they’ve had some other company tell them that they need to do something that they don’t necessarily have to. Also, people are usually pretty upset that when they find out they are going to have to actually pay for this service, so making them understand that while it may be $250 if they go somewhere else they’re not going to get the best quality or the other company may not clean it right. It’s a challenge just trying to make people realize that it’s really horrible now, but that if they do this and take care of it now it’s going to really help them down the road.

K: You said you were married. What does your husband do?

C: Yes, my husband is an airline pilot for U.S. Airways, but he is currently furloughed, so right now he’s working for my brother’s contracting company. He has a background in computers though, so before he finished his airline training he was a computer programmer compiling RFID chips.

K: "So how would you say the recession has affected your job and work life in general?"
C: "My job here has been very steady (thankfully!), and Michigan Power Rodding has continued to do very well even though there's a sort of slowing down from what they were five years ago, which was just kind of the beginning of the economic slide. So my job hasn't been directly affected, but people around me have. If my husband had stayed with the company he was working for previous to flying, he would be out of a job because they are pretty close to being completely closed. A lot of the decline in customers here is directly related to the automotive decline, because most of Michigan's residents work in the auto industry, so when [these companies] leave people out of jobs, [the people] aren't calling us as much."

K: “Alright, well those are all questions I have. Is there anything else you’d like to add?”

C: “No, I think that’s it.”

K: “Okay. Thank you for your time.”