Being broke is a common thread in the college student’s story. It’s the basis by which we come to commiserate with one another over having to eat ramen for the twentieth meal in a row and wonder if $5 is too much to spend. To remedy these ills, many of us decide to get a job of some sort. For me, this looked like working with the school’s dining hall.

My job only lasted a semester, until academics and programs made it impossible to work and be a student simultaneously. However, the short experience nonetheless gave me a lot of insight.

I worked in the dish room (by choice). My shifts were usually between 4 and 8 p.m. two or three times a week, and from 2:00 - 7:00 p.m. on Sundays.

While I was there, I met some of the greatest bunch of people I have yet to know. I met an African woman who is kind and stern, and still gives me a bear hug every time I see her. I got to know another student and may have occasionally used the hoses as water guns against her. I had one of the nicest bosses, who referred to our shift as “a family” and would give us ice cream bars after particularly long days. I met a lot of other fantastic people too, but describing them would be an essay in and of itself.

Overall, it was a great job with even greater people.

My responsibilities included grabbing dishes, hosing them off, getting any stains off the surfaces, putting them in the washer, organizing them in the appropriate places, cleaning up the station and taking out the trash when needed.

To a lot of people, this sounds pretty simple. Admittedly, it doesn’t require much skill. However, this surface view doesn’t take into account the physical demand behind the job.

The dish room was often understaffed. Many nights, it would be me and one another person washing dishes for several hundred people. This meant having to take on multiple responsibilities at once and switch them often. Regardless of how busy we were, I would always leave exhausted and in pain. Sometimes I would come home with chemical burns and in the winter my hands looked almost leprous.

Around this time, the debate over raising the minimum wage to $15 and hour began.

To give some background: I come from a conservative family in a conservative area, and at the time was rather conservative myself. To a large extent, I still am.

As I worked in the dish room, I had to admit something very un-conservative: I understood why people would argue for a $15/hour for jobs that required minimum skill.

I understood wanting to be paid more than $58 for eight hours of work (this is according to the national minimum wage; full-time staff got slightly higher at $9 starting in the dining hall). I understood coming home with aching joints and exhaustion, but not having your responsibilities end there. I understood theoretically having a lunch break, but being unable to take it because work is too busy and there is no one to take your place—so instead, you scrounge from the uneaten food coming down the line, or choke down a small plate of food while you work simultaneously. I understood wanting to be paid more for work that caused physical strain, pain and damage. I understood this, and I didn’t even work full time.

I also saw how many low paying jobs don’t primarily employ the “teens and students needing work.” Most of the people I worked with were adults with families. I saw how the “just work harder” or “just work your way out of that” wasn’t a possibility for many of them, because that required taking time off they couldn’t afford to take off because bills are a reality. I saw a man who came in while I was walking to my 7:45 a.m. class and left when I closed my shift at 8 p.m., while going to school to be a mechanic and raising a family. I wondered when he slept and why we glorify killing yourself in nearly every way just to survive. I wondered why we don’t value someone’s humanity when we argue over how much to pay them.

I took a lot of things out of my job that semester, including many valuable friendships and experiences. But some of the things I learned came with political implications because I understood the argument for a living wage—and I came to agree.