Eastern Illinois University Housing and Dining Services is offering Eastern students jobs on campus for this spring semester.

Mark Hudson, the director of housing and dining, said Housing and Dining service is the largest single department that employs students.

In the dining operation areas, they have 450 students working for them in places such as the Stevenson Tower, Taylor Dinning, Thomas Dining, Java Beanery and Bakery, University Food Court and Panther Catering. 

Hudson said that along with the dining services, they also hire students to be desk assistants, computer lab assistants and resident assistants.

The students are limited in the number of hours they can work in a payroll period, which Hudson said is around 20 hours although the students are able to work less if they decide.    

He said students who work while in school also gain additional benefits since they get connections within the institution and connections with the people they work alongside. 

“People who do the cooking in the dining centers get very attached to their student workers,” Hudson said. “They have very good relations with each other, and I know I’ve got a lot of them that say, ‘Yup, I’ve gotten Christmas cards for 20 years.’”

Courtney Strolle, the central hiring assistant, said the experience the student workers deal with is one of the good practices they get by working in the dining facilities.

“There is just so many people that go through the dining facilities,” Strolle said. “You’re gonna get the quiet people, you’re gonna get the loud people, you’re going to get everyone and from all different kinds of cultures.”

Julie Cutright, the office support specialist and hiring for panther dining, said she has given people their very first jobs by having them work in the dining services. 

“We have had a lot of students that have come through that had no experience,” Cutright said. “And we are willing to work with them.”

Cutright said for students pursuing a dinning job, they mainly look for the student’s registration in a current term.

“When we have them come in for an interview, we look at their schedules and compare it to a schedule in a different facility and we try to match things up the best that we can,” Cutright said.   

Although, she said for the moment they are looking to fill in places they need people to work in.

Cutright said returning students that have worked in the field do not need to reapply to work their previous dining job. 

She said if they have talked with their manager before a semester had ended, they have a position available to them.

Cutright said an advantage of working in a dining place on campus is students do not need transportation, they can just walk to any of the facilities and they work around their class schedule.

“A lot of them have commented that when they work off campus, it’s been harder to work with their school schedules,” Cutright said. “We don’t do that. We try to make it so that they can do school first and then work second.”

Hudson said for the dining job applications it is all done through the panther dining website, where he said there is a tab that links to the application.

He also said if students want to be a desk assistant, the student needs to be living in the building they are applying for, since they will know information about the building and can guide other students. 

Valentina Vargas can be reached at 581-2812 or vvargas@eiu.edu.