BY DANIEL PFEIFLE
At up to 900 bucks a month — not including whatever your meal plan costs if you have one — living on campus can be expensive, and even if you’re not living on campus, some extra money is always nice. So how do you find a job on campus?
The most common answer you will recieve is the Community Opportunities Database (CODA). Supposedly this is the easiest way to find a job as an Evergreen student. It takes some getting used to.
CODA is a website that all Evergreen students have access to through their my.evergreen.edu account. When you first open it up, you’ll find a page with a bunch of useless info. Just click on “jobs and opportunities search.” This is where you’ll find the available jobs. You will now find yourself on a webpage with a ton of jobs, most of which will not apply to you, so you’ll want to specify your search.
I’d suggest doing an “Advanced search” it makes irrelevant jobs harder to accidentally click on. If you do qualify for work study, set position type to “Work study” if not, select “Student Employment/part time jobs”. Work study is a type of financial aid that allows students to get paid partially by the government, and partially by their employer, these positions make up about a third of available on campus jobs. If you’re unsure whether you have work study, leave it out for now and ask financial aid later; All students can work non work study jobs, but only work study students can do work study jobs.
You can save your searches to save time, but be careful about hitting the back button on your browser. If you use the browser to go back from a posting, you will lose your search. Use the green back button located in the top right corner of the page. You know, the one that is tiny and out of the way, that you would never see if you weren’t looking for it? That one.
Each posting has different rules about how to apply. Some jobs want you to fill out their application, others want you to email them certain files. Certain jobs on campus require a generic Evergreen application. You can pick up copies at the Student Employment Office (LIB 1102). But, if you’d like to save some time filling out the same application 50 times, you can instead scan a completed copy of it into your computer and just print it off when you need it.
When (and if) you get a job offer, you will need to submit an I-9 form verifying you have to prove you have permission to work in the US. Thankfully, once you submit your verification, it will remain on file, so you just need to get it signed off by student employment.
When you do finally get a job, keep in mind that you can only work nineteen hours a week, and your hours must be logged to get paid. Logging hours is done through a secure page on your my.evergreen account, which is not unlocked until you get a job. When you get one, you will have access to a whole new section called “employees,” where you can log hours, request sick leave, see pay stubs, and so on. For every forty hours you work, you are entitled to one hour of paid sick leave. Keep in mind that your sick leave can be moved to another job, but only on campus, and cannot be used to get out of trouble when you fail to show up for work.
So that’s the jist of working on campus. Do you have what it takes to find a job? Probably, cause about a half of all Evergreen students have a job on campus, so if you want one you can probably find one. But now you know how, so you should have a much better time doing so.
