06/02/2026
Since we are hiring, let me write a general job philosophy that guides my approach to employee management, told through my own experience up until I attended college.
My first "job" was volunteering at the Austin Public Library. Pure drudgery. Summer of my eighth-grade year and it was spent in the basement of the library going through parts of the library collection that it wanted to rid itself of--think romance novels and old vinyls--and pricing the items via Ebay searches for a big "yard-sale" that would happen later on. When we got bored of doing that, there were large stacks of envelopes that needed to be stuffed with mass mailing communications. 8 AM to noon, summer vacation, no phones, no breaks, and the only payment was a pizza party at the close of the summer that I had to skip due to conflicts with my other extracurriculars.
Sophomore summer of high school I volunteered at Camp CAMP, a camp for disabled children in the Hill Country near San Antonio. We had a week of training where we learned how to take care of the kids--everything from changing diapers to how to act in a medical emergency. The second week we were assigned a camper and had to care for them throughout the week. The week I volunteered was cerebral palsy week, and most campers were physically disabled, some completely. My particular camper only had mild cerebral palsy, but severe autism. Very intense--8 AM to 8 PM. No phones, no breaks, free meals.
The first time I got paid to work was as a teacher at Breakthrough Collaborative, a program to provide enrichment summer education for underrepresented minorities. Junior year summer I went down to UT every day to teach math to a classroom of rising eighth graders. I'm a pretty awful teacher, and teaching is a lot of work--you may only be in classes for a little bit, but there is a huge amount of preparation before classes and debriefing after classes to find areas of improvement. Plus the students need to be entertained--so we spent a time practicing a dance for them. This was exhausting work and I found myself sleeping on the bus to downtown each morning. No phones, no breaks, $2000 for the summer.
I'll stop here and say I got terrible performance reviews at these last two internships. I already felt like I worked myself to the bone, but others were working even harder, and more was expected of me. Frankly, I just gave up on Camp CAMP after the first real week, but I couldn't at Breakthrough and throughout the summer I upped my game and ultimately left on good terms. I'm grateful these people told me the truth, even though it sucked to hear.
My "real" jobs in high school were comparatively easy. Folding clothes, greeting customers, and occasionally running the register at Hollister for $5.25 an hour--10 cents above minimum wage. Some friends started working at Target for a massive 40% raise--$7.50 an hour, so I joined them and quickly learned that they made you work for the extra $2.25. Customer flow was non-stop, the items were varied, and they wouldn't let the part-timers leave until the whole store was cleaned up if you worked the closing shift. No phones, but now a break. The break at Hollister was actually pretty good, you could walk around the mall. But a break at Target just meant walking around Target for 15 minutes.
A retail job is everything its stereotyped to be. I had a couple managers who were college-educated but had music majors and couldn't find better paying employment. Turnover was high in those ranks, much less the cashiers. I remember one girl quitting after her first shift. Call outs, especially on Friday nights, were endemic. And no one really cared.
Breakthrough paid less than minimum wage, and Camp CAMP basically paid nothing at all. The work was much, much harder. Yet the criticism I received from my supervisors was worth multiples more than the wages I received from Target or Hollister. That's how we view employment at our gym. We pay wages that are competitive with other gyms in the area, and we're going to pay forward the criticism that developed us early in our careers.
As an aside, Breakthrough and Camp CAMP are still around and some of the best opportunities for a high schooler/college student.
