From Lingerie to Research
Happy 25th blogpost!
I’ve been considering covering this topic for a while, and we feel like a 25th blogpost celebration is the right time to talk about underwear.
As you might have understood already from my previous posts (like the imposter syndrome one, the tutoring one, or the placement one) I strongly believe in the following:
- Try loads of different things, that’s the only way you’ll know what you want / don’t want to do with your life
- No experience is a waste, each one can teach you something that will be valuable for the rest of your life
- Diversity is unbelievably enriching and rewarding.
All of the above also apply to student jobs.
To elaborate on these, let me tell you about the job I had for 5 years.
Let’s get some drumroll for the French-est student job ever …
Lingerie sales assistant, at Princesse tam.tam
Aren’t I such a French cliché?
But in all seriousness, I learnt so much in this little kingdom of silk and lace.
1. Experience in doing things I’m totally not qualified to do
As for most (all?) of the things I do, when I applied for the job, I very honestly told the manager I had absolutely no experience in sale things, customer things, or lingerie things (but if you want to know about Biology, I’m your girl), but I loved the brand, so I thought I’d give it a go. That’s literally how I got the job. On my first day I spent 2 hours with another sales assistant, and then I spent the rest of the day holding the ship on my own. I must have given the worst lingerie advice ever to my first 20 customers, but that day was a crash acting course in “pretend you’re on top of things when you’re very much not”. What Imposter Syndrome?
2. Experience in developing expert knowledge of rarely useful topics
I know all there is to know about lingerie. I can guess your bra size in less than 5 seconds (in France, not in the UK, too much padding in this country, everything is a mess). As I have seen more bare breasts than a PornHub premium user (and I was paid for that), I know all the possible breast shapes. I can give you a 2-hour long talk on the different types of bras and briefs. And I’m the best person to accompany you bra shopping. None of these are useful outside of the world of a lingerie shop. But when you do a PhD, let’s be honest, you also get an expert knowledge of things that 99.99% of the world population doesn’t care about. Same thing.
3. Experience in working with customers/participants
For the data collection part of my PhD, I sometimes spend 12 hours per day with participants. For some reason, I actually enjoy these testing days when I can talk about my work with people (I always manage to fit 5/10 min of science communication time halfway through the appointment, and you know how much I love Sci-Com). Still, it can be quite exhausting to be in full Social-and-Engaging-Girl mode, especially when, like me, your natural self is very much the opposite. In a way, these data collection days remind me of my days in the lingerie shop. The customers there were mostly paying for the “customer experience”, meaning they had to be pampered from the moment they were stepping in the shop until the moment they left. I quickly saw that as a sort of play, with my “lingerie shop character”. I’ve realised that on some data collection days, I go back into character. In the end pampering customers and pampering participants are pretty much the same things!
4. Diversity and how to stand out
Who could have guessed how unusual it is to see “Lingerie sales assistant” in an academic CV? I never hide my unusual job experience, and let me tell you, it is a brilliant conversation starter!
As you can see, even though there is quite a world between advising posh ladies on their panties and researching bilingualism in autism in a top university, both actually rely on some similar skills (not fully the same, but at least a couple, come on). These 5 years surrounded in lace and satin taught me so much, and the examples above are just a few.
And you, what is your weirdest student job?
Sincerely,
-Bérengère
