Open Your Eyes & You’ll Be Surprised What You’ll See
The world inside JFK airport is nothing to me. I spent several years working as a mechanic in JFK, and plan to spend a whole lot more. I worked with ramp agents everyday, but there was always a bit of wonder as to how their lives may be compared to mine. When given the task to become a social scientist, it dawned on me, this was the perfect opportunity to solve many unanswered questions, that have floated in my mind for quite some time. I thought I knew it all, but what I found was surprising. Not only, was it an awakening of the industry I work in, it was also a process of becoming a better writer and ethnographer.
I’ve worked at Terminal One at JFK for about two years now. I’ve spent a good amount of time working among the Dnata ramp agents. I’ve understood there task and their responsibilities only a few weeks of just normal observation at work. It was only when I realized that they’re not just a company or a workforce, but rather a subculture within a larger culture, that there was so much more to them. Their habits, their jargon, how they treat one another, the role of leaders, the emotions of work, and the outstanding problems the subculture faces. Dnata ramp agents serve several essential task which you can read about in my papers, and they’re the backbone of air travel. They often do the heavy work that some rather not, which include heaving lifting of cargo, baggage handling, and lavatory servicing. One issue I noticed, that became the focus of my paper was the high turnover rate at Dnata. Instead of observing and researching the industry as a whole, I looked into the common problems such as low wages and safety that affects the ramp agent subculture worldwide.
It was an awakening of how much truly goes on when you open your eyes. Not only getting to observe the agents, but also getting to interview a ramp agent named Mohammed Alsaidi. You learn the humanity of being in the subculture. The toll it can take on one and the importance of leadership roles in a subculture. If you do not lead by example, people will not follow. When conducting the interview, I learned a great deal of what its like to be and feel as if one is in the culture. The worries on has and the reasons that lead to Dnata’s larger issues of a large number of quitting employees. Then when I did my own research through several scholarly articles, I learned how this affects the subculture as a whole. It was eye-opening.
Aside from gaining much insight on the subculture, becoming an social scientist allowed for much improvement in my writing. Articulation of certain feelings was a difficulty I had initially. Getting words onto a paper seemed impossible. That all changed after a few free writes. Whatever comes to mind should go on paper, and revising solves all the problems later down the line. Starting a paper was a weakness I learned to overcome through my writings as a social scientist. From my introduction letter, all the way to my research paper. I saw an improvement in not only my grammar, but the usefulness of words, and the lack of others. During my observation, I took notice of many things, but I learned to include what was most important, with such detail, that one who reads the words can draw the image in their mind. It was a remarkable process, to watch my writing evolve, from where I started to where I am now. One of the most important rules I learned in being an ethnographer, and being a social scientist, is that you write each paper as if there was nothing ever written before. To understand what I mean by that; each paper should not build on the last, and each reader is a newborn, and the only way to make one understand, is to write as if you’ve only seen a certain subculture for the first time.
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