What does your job consist of?

I milk cows and feed baby cows. If any cow is sick, I assist with that, or if they are having trouble giving birth, I assist with that. I also help with artificial insemination. I’ve been the proud father of a few cows.

What are the pros and cons to your job?

It’s really fun and really relaxing out there, and it’s beautiful. It’s really fun feeling like the mother of the calves.

A lot of the times at 3 in the morning, I have to go milk cows. The biggest con is getting pooped on. Going in at 3 in the morning is better than that.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve done?

There was a cow that had a calf coming out backward. They should come out like they are diving, and if they come out backwards, their umbilical cord breaks and they start drowning. The farmers pulled the calf out of the cow, put it over a fence and started hitting it to get the water out of its lungs so it would live.

LEA STUART
Junior, Atlanta, public relations
Work place: Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study

What does your job consist of?

I get an individual mosquito and … through many steps, I extract the DNA and purify it. Then I amplify the DNA so that [our research facility] has a lot of DNA to look at. We’re simply getting an X amount and then multiplying it by 1,000. I’m testing for what animals [the mosquitoes] have been feeding on.

What are the pros and cons?

A pro is the way this expands my perception of science. It gives me a keen insight on what research is really like.

Room for error is vast. I’m working under the funds of someone else, and anything that I mess up costs people money. Each thing takes a lot of time.

What is the craziest thing you’ve experienced?

I got to watch my friend extract the brain stem of a hawk. And it most likely had West Nile virus, so the brain was hemorrhaging.

WILL URBANSKI
5th year senior, Roanoke, Va., computer science
Place of work: UGA Department of Information Security

What does your job consist of?

I help with daily security operations, which include monitoring the University’s network security devices, fighting spam and computer viruses, and helping with computer incident response on campus.

When your computer becomes infected with a virus often your computer will join a “botnet” where your computer becomes a node in a giant peer-to-peer network used by hackers to steal identities, send spam and attack other computers. I seek out and block “Botmasters” on a daily basis.

What have you learned from it?

No one realizes how dangerous the Internet is becoming! As a result of my job, I am now scared to use Windows systems due to the number of viruses a Windows machine has to defend against.

DEVIN MYERS
5th year senior, Atlanta, ecology
Multiple small jobs

Describe the jobs you have.

I prefer stringing small gigs and commitments together over having one single job. I do a couple shifts over at Snelling, which is great because of the flexibility. I bartend at the Terrapin brewery, deliver fliers for different clubs and bars, and harvest and vend mistletoe in malls during winter holidays.

I’m always taking production assistant gigs for filming commercials in Atlanta. I’m planning on trying out nude modeling for the Art School and patenting some recent inventions.

What are the pros and cons of not having steady employment?

Accumulated, [the jobs] allow me to get by, and I don’t worry too much because all my eggs aren’t in the same basket. Some time is wasted, though, because I’m always hunting down the next best thing. The diversified income represents security and variety. Why get stuck in a single crappy job when you can have several poor-paying jobs? I’m always on call for services for hire.