Summer Student Profile: Meet Paige Gregory
After getting her start with Habitat For Humanity Halton-Mississauga as a co-op student, Paige Gregory is back as a summer student working as a Warehouse Associate. Her job “involves organizing the warehouse, making sure it’s kept tidy, helping load and unload the trucks that come in and just managing people and making sure everyone’s organized.”
Paige said that her daily schedule varies. “Typically in the morning, we start (by) making sure the warehouse is clean,organized, so (we) take out the garbage, the cardboard, sweep (and) make sure it’s a clean environment for us to work in. Throughout the day it’s always different,” she said, laughing. “Nothing is ever the same. We have trucks come in and anything can be on the truck; so we have to be prepared for that. We’re always organizing stuff, sorting stuff that comes in and making sure that everything gets out and priced in a timely manner.”
Paige just graduated from high school and is heading to Ryerson University to study Business Technology Management. She chose the program because it seemed interesting to her. “Technology is in our everyday (lives) and I love business, so I thought that merging the two would be a good idea,” she explained. After she graduates, she is thinking of becoming a systems engineer and working “at Cisco or one of those big companies.”
Her work at Habitat relates to her program because of the different skills she is learning. “Not only am I in the warehouse, but sometimes I do have to interact with customers and talk to people, and a big part of business is making connections, talking to people (and) being interactive with others,” Paige said. She also said that her goal this summer is to interact more with people and other customers at the ReStore. “For my field of work, I might have to be selling products, so making sure I brush up on those skills and learn different things in different ways” will be helpful, she said.
At the end of the day, Paige said that she enjoys Habitat’s atmosphere. “It’s a really good environment. Everyone’s fun, relaxed, but they like to get their work done. It makes you want to come back here every day,” she said. True to that, Paige’s favourite memories at Habitat involve her co-workers. “I have now, I would say, hopefully lifelong friends that I’ve met here. So it’s a good environment.”
