A Student Assistant is a position for a student enrolled at university and entails assisting faculty members, basically in everything they do not want to do themselves. This includes a wide variety of tasks, from handling administrative tasks related to the academic matters of students to proofreading academic papers, sourcing references, or doing research for lecture preparation.
There are part-time student assistant positions available on most college campuses. Most of the job is done either at campus offices, responding to student inquiries, handling admission forms, or maintaining student files or at the library doing the legwork for academic research, collecting and organizing data.
However, you need to have great interpersonal skills as well because student assistants contribute to organizing community life on the campus, helping students not only with administrative problems but occasionally providing counseling for personal matters, too.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a student assistant. For example, did you know that they make an average of $11.77 an hour? That's $24,473 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 4% and produce 55,400 job opportunities across the U.S.
There are certain skills that many student assistants have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed patience, communication skills and emotional skills.
When it comes to the most important skills required to be a student assistant, we found that a lot of resumes listed 9.3% of student assistants included customer service, while 8.7% of resumes included communication, and 5.6% of resumes included front office. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
When it comes to searching for a job, many search for a key term or phrase. Instead, it might be more helpful to search by industry, as you might be missing jobs that you never thought about in industries that you didn't even think offered positions related to the student assistant job title. But what industry to start with? Most student assistants actually find jobs in the education and hospitality industries.
If you're interested in becoming a student assistant, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 70.1% of student assistants have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 10.1% of student assistants have master's degrees. Even though most student assistants have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a student assistant. When we researched the most common majors for a student assistant, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or master's degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on student assistant resumes include associate degree degrees or high school diploma degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a student assistant. In fact, many student assistant jobs require experience in a role such as internship. Meanwhile, many student assistants also have previous career experience in roles such as sales associate or cashier.