Reflective Essay Example (With Breakdown)

I took a job at a call center the summer I turned twenty because I had been rejected from the research internship I wanted and I was too tired to spend another week looking. The job was terrible in all the ways call-center jobs are terrible. The script was long. The calls were to people who had missed payments on a credit card I had never heard of. The training was six hours and included a section on how to de-escalate people who started crying on the phone, which happened more often than I expected. I assumed I would hate it, and I did hate it, and I took something from it that I did not expect to take and have not been able to stop thinking about. At the time I thought what the job was teaching me was resilience — the kind of vague, resume-shaped lesson that experiences like this are supposed to teach. Looking back three years later, I think what it was actually teaching me was something more specific and less flattering: I had not, until that summer, ever spoken at length with anyone whose financial situation was really precarious. The callers I spoke to were not poor in the abstract way I had read about in a sociology class. They were specific people with specific bills, and they were mostly trying to figure out whether the thirty-seven dollars they had left in checking should go to the card I was calling about or to something else. My job was to try to convince them it should go to the card. I was not particularly good at it. The lesson I did not know I was learning was that almost everything I had learned about other people's financial lives in twenty years of school had been abstract in a specific way — the way a map is abstract compared to walking through a neighborhood. I knew the statistics on household debt. I did not know what it sounded like to hear a woman in her fifties apologize for crying because she had been laid off and was embarrassed about it. The apology was the part I could not get over. She was apologizing to me, a twenty-year-old college student she had never met, for crying about her own life, because she had been raised to think that crying on a phone call was rude. I quit the job after six weeks. I did not quit because I had learned what I was going to learn; I quit because I could not stand another call. The two things I am still not sure about are whether quitting was the right choice and whether the summer taught me what I think it taught me or something I am flattering myself about in retrospect. I have noticed, since then, that I listen to people differently when they are talking about money — more carefully, with less of the academic detachment that my courses had trained in me. Whether that is a change or a story I tell about a change, I cannot fully say. If there is a conclusion to draw, it is not that the job made me a better person. It might have; it might not have. What I can say is that it put me into contact with a texture of other people's lives that my reading had never given me, and that the texture has stayed with me in a way the statistics did not. That is not a moral. It is an observation about what kind of knowledge sticks and what kind slides off.