I'm no longer making pizzas for a living!

After I left university I got a part-time job at Tesco on the pizza counter. It was great fun, and I loved my colleagues, but I never intended on staying there for long. Once we moved away from Lincoln I decided that I would look for a job that could be the start of a career and put my very expensive degree to some use. By chance, my mum discovered that a local specialist college was looking for new staff members to join the team, and as they say the rest is history!

I've been in my current role as a learning support assistant for two weeks now. The college has students with all kinds of different needs and it's our job to help them to participate in classes and achieve their goals. We have students with mild to severe learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, students who are deaf, students who have social phobia, just all kinds of people with varying levels of needs - the work that the college does is so important in helping those who don't get on with typical school settings all that well to gain independence and other key skills.

You might think that you would get some sort of shadowing experience for this kind of role, or at least training before you started - you'd be wrong! The approach that's adopted by my college is to throw you in at the deep end by chucking you straight into a classroom full of students with complex needs and let you learn as you go. I now understand that it's the only way to learn, really, because no matter how much training you receive you'll never know the best way to work with your students until you know them. Everyone is different, every day is different.

I have to admit that on my first day I did have a wobbly moment because I felt a little out of my depth and I just didn't know if I was going to enjoy the role, I didn't feel like I was contributing anything, and I didn't want my new employers to think that I was useless. Fortunately the tutor and other support workers were really understanding, and in the afternoon things picked up a little. I was mortified about getting teary on the first day, but I couldn't have chosen an organisation with nicer staff and I've received a lot of fantastic advice over the past couple of weeks which has helped me to feel more comfortable in the role.

The best advice I got was probably to just stick with it. The only reason that I felt out of my depth was because I didn't know what to do, or the different classes I'd be helping in, so it was only natural to feel like an extra body in the room to begin with and in hindsight I wish I'd just relaxed more. I thought about quitting a couple of times in the first week and every time someone asked me if I was enjoying it I could only say that it was going alright because I was embarrassed about not knowing what to do instantly, and thought they must know how badly I was doing. Believing in myself has never been a strength of mine, but fortunately determination is! I'm glad that I stuck with it because I'm already starting to enjoy it a lot more now, and hopefully I'll get better at it with time.