This summer was a little strange for me.

I didn’t go home to my native South Florida, but instead I lived with an amazingly kind and generous family in South Whittier. I borrowed a car from a friend who was going out of the country for the summer – a glorious teal station wagon. Then I started job hunting.

Over the month of June, I became quite the employment connoisseur —- I had no less than five websites that I checked daily for new jobs, bookmarking every promising new lead. Of all my possible employment opportunities, the one I was most excited to apply for was the job doing social media marketing for a chocolate company. Can you imagine? I could get twenty dollars an hour to sit on Facebook telling people to eat chocolate. Not to mention that as an employee, I might have the prospect of free samples. Unfortunately, that dream never came true.

Instead, I got a job through a staffing service, also known as a temp agency and I began my work with them as “hospitality” for an event. “Hospitality” means being the nice, smiling, polite person who steers people away from the areas of the facility that they are visiting that are off limits. Since almost none of the event “guests” spoke more than five words of English my main job ended up being standing around while tourists took pictures with me.

A couple of weeks later, the agency called me and asked whether I would be interested in taking a full-time job at a bank as a file clerk.

“The only problem with it,” my supervisor explained, “is that there’s a lot of mandatory overtime. Is that okay with you?”

She might as well have asked me whether I wanted to have a birthday this year. Yes, I was definitely interested in getting consistent overtime pay.

I worked at the bank for three weeks. During that time I realized why most people don’t work twelve-hour days. I began to fall asleep during most evenings in the middle of writing emails, watching Hulu, or just sitting on the couch. My bedtime went from being around midnight to around 8:30. The few times I went out hot tubbing or to a movie during the week I quickly regretted it after the fact. I felt the same way towards my pillow that a ravenous wolf does towards his prey. I was tired.

After those three weeks, I started becoming physically ill from all of the overtime, and missed the idea of having a real weekend that didn’t involve working. Being sick led to taking time off, and the problem with working as a temp is that once you don’t come in, you’re easily replaceable. So, that was the end of that job.

Next, I turned to finding employment in the world of children. It seemed like a logical step since I was sleeping enough again and thus had energy. I found a job tutoring French for a local family with three kids, and quickly discovered that nine-year-olds learn differently than five-year-olds. I also helped one of my Cinema & Media Arts professors teach what basically amounted to middle school “film camp.” This meant that I followed sixth-graders around while repeatedly reminding them how much the video cameras that they were shakily carrying had cost. Still, they were great kids, and it was a lot of fun.

Besides hospitality, banks and kids, my summer was dotted with several major-related one-time-jobs over the summer, including my first gig as a wedding videographer. The happy couple were some Biola juniors that I had known since freshman year, albeit not very well, so it was exciting – and scary – to see people my age, from my school, tying the knot. It was definitely a good experience, especially filming the dancing. Improvised “Thriller” dances are a wonderful thing.

Finally, I was a camera operator for a media conference in Pasadena. The biggest draw to the job for me was the fact that Zachary Levi – the star of the television show “Chuck” and my first celebrity crush since middle school – was the keynote speaker. I got to spend three hours assigned specifically to focus the camera in on his face. I didn’t have a problem with that at all, let me tell you.

Afterwards, I rushed out the back door, hoping to get a picture with him before he left. I got within 15 feet of him and was stopped by a polite, but firm, female security guard. I woefully stood, watching, as he thanked the leaders of the conference and drove off and called out “Bye, Zach!” after him. I felt like a twelve-year-old at a Jonas Brothers concert.

I suppose the moral of this story is that yes, students, there are jobs out there. Just be open to looking for them in strange places.