Kayla Hollingsworth '19
Concentration: English, Secondary in Government
House: Currier
Employer: Office of Public Interest Advising
Kayla Hollingsworth has worked several jobs on campus and was nominated for her work at the Law School in the Office of Public Interest Advising (OPIA). She has also worked on Dorm Crew for the past four years where she worked her way up to being a captain, and was also a Radcliffe Research fellow for two years prior to this semester. She works ten to eleven hours per week with OPIA, about three hours per week with Dorm Crew, and worked ten hours per week at Radcliffe. This semester she works about fourteen hours per semester.
At the Law School, she works in an administration role planning events such as dinners and scavenger hunts, inviting fellowship winners, and also files papers, answers phone calls, and does hiring contacts, where people are contacted once they graduate from the Law School. For Dorm Crew, she is a clean up captain and has to plan out how the cleaning and team building will take place. This past school year she would clean Cabot House. At Radcliffe, she was a research fellow, so she is a research assistant to the professors that are putting together novels or articles or other works. There are different professors involved with a main research topic, and they tell the students to research related articles, whether they should look for primary or secondary resources, different articles or books, and through the student’s annotations, they can decide whether or not to pursue the article more in depth.
One of the things she learned is how to do research at advanced level, since she hadn’t done any research before college, she now feels comfortable doing research at this level. She is glad she has worked and encourages others even it if is isn’t geared specifically towards ones future career, it might just be to gain some extra cash or to have a separation between work and school. Through her work she has learned how to balance time, met lots of people that she wouldn’t have otherwise met, and has learned a lot from the people she met through listening to their stories and struggles. She says it is nice to be able to be in a work setting and not just be working solely in an academic workspace.
She was initially drawn to these jobs because she needed money for personal spending, and after working night shifts at the CVS in Harvard Square for her freshman year she realized she needed an on campus job, so she started working with Dorm Crew her freshman spring. She is grateful because she has met so many amazing people and they are the reason she continues to come back. She was drawn to work at OPIA because she has an interest in law and saw that they were looking for an administrative assistant. She feels it has really opened her eyes to the world of law, what applications to law schools look like and what constitutes a good application, and what you can do and where you can go with law. She feels that this jobs is teaching her less specific and more broad skills, but she feels like she could learn anything job specific at a job.
Her experience as a student worker has been immensely positive. She has loves having a space that is not solely oriented around classes as it helps to make a well rounded person, saying she was shy beforehand and is not as shy anymore. She believes there is a disconnect between those who work and those who do not. Those who don’t work do not understand how to manage their time as well and don’t understand why kids who have to work can’t spend as much time on homework or on social events, and that it is interesting to be treated as the help.
Aside from her two jobs on campus, she has been involved in the Harvard Model United Nations for all 4 years, the largest Model UN program in the nation, helping with the conferences held in Boston and running the program this year. She puts in about 15-20 hours per week, and this year she was the Director General (similar to a VP), and had 60 nations represented this year by about 3500+ students. She is also on the girls water polo team, she records videos, splices them together, and edits them. She is on the board for the International Relations Council, she teaches high school students about International relations and domestic issues with the Harvard Program for International Education (HPIE), she has gone to Dubai and Boston Congresses for Harvard Model Congress, and has worked at the State House.