Robert Smith is president of Slippery Rock University.My first paying job, I was 12 years old. I worked for 40 cents an hour, and I worked 12-hour days.It was in a service station in Wichita, Kansas. I put gas in people's cars, checked tires, checked the oil.In those days there was no such thing as self-service. If you self-served, we called that stealing. There was no distinction up until reasonably modern times between full service and self-service. Everything was full service - in fact it was a safety issue.Those were in the days when gas was 29 cents a gallon, which is relevant: When you think about gas at 29 cents a gallon - gas can go up 29 cents in one day.I was also doing minor mechanical things. That's how I worked my way through high school and the first part of college. I did that for 10 years.It really helps to have had a job doing that kind of thing in terms of your overall perspective about work, about values, about people.I learned a lot about life. I learned a lot about service people - how people treat service people like waitresses, flight attendants and gas station attendants.And that has been very, very important for me to not lose respect because someone is delivering a service for you. They are not your slaves.I learned a work ethic, absolutely, respect for people and not making the assumption that because of what a person's job is, then they must not have intelligence.One of the recurring expectations was by the person who assumed that because you worked there, you had no intelligence - you had no aspirations.