By Amy Pearson
Cardinal Staff
Dr. Tycho de Boer, associate professor of history, did not always have the luxury of his third-floor office in Saint Mary’s Hall. He attended college at the University of Groningen, in Holland, and is quick to recall the summers that he spent working numerous industrial jobs in order to help pay his way through school.
“It was not glamorous work,” said de Boer. “It was the film and grime of industrial work.”
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Despite the less-than-desirable working conditions and the monotony of assembly line labor, de Boer is grateful for the knowledge that he gained from his summer employment during his college years. “What I liked in the end was the range of experiences,” de Boer said. “It was those jobs that gave me the motivation to stay in college.”
The first of several jobs that de Boer had during college was at a factory that produced the rubber lining that is placed around the edges of car windows. While at work, he was responsible for overseeing the spooling of long rubber pieces as they wound their way around large spools. He then had to cut the pieces of rubber after the spool was full and place them into boxes.
Describing his worst day of working at this factory, de Boer said, “I found myself underneath a machine scooping up leaked oil with two pieces of cardboard, crammed under the machine in filth.” It was then that de Boer realized exactly why he wanted to stay in school. Assembly line work was not a career he wanted to continue for the rest of his life.
Not an easy experience to forget, de Boer uses it to help educate his students during several of his classes. “When you talk about labor history, a lot of students don’t really know what it’s like to work in a factory, and of course my experience wasn’t anywhere near how it was in the 19th century, but to stand by a machine for eight hours, with only a few breaks, at least I have some idea of what that means,” said de Boer. “It’s important as a teacher to have that experience.”
Another memorable summer for de Boer was one spent among the company of many bumblebees. “I worked at a palace in my hometown,” de Boer said. “I remember the bees very well.”
De Boer’s job at the palace involved working in a restaurant and concession stand in the garden. He served customers and cleared dishes at the end of the day, “which of course all had little bits of pop left over in them,” de Boer said. “The backstage of that job was just piles of dirty dishes that I then had to load up at the end of the day and take to the kitchen and wash.”
It was from that job that de Boer learned an eight-hour-work day in a service job does not necessarily mean only eight hours. “Industrial work after eight hours means you’re done, but in a job like that, it means eight hours and then the clean up,” de Boer said.
De Boer also worked for a cleaning company one summer. During his time with the company, he was assigned to work at a bicycle factory and had to help update the company’s safety regulations. This meant going around the entire factory and painting yellow safety lines on the floor. “Those things stick in your mind. I look back and think, yeah, I spent two weeks spray-painting yellow lines on the floor,” said de Boer with a laugh.
Admitting that his summer jobs were not the most thrilling, de Boer does recommend them, or similar ones, to current college students in search of summer employment.
“It was the range of experiences that I really liked,” de Boer said. “They were different kinds of experiences.”
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