From Brower to Bachelor's, Rutgers baker discusses her 42 years of service
After 42 years of working in Rutgers Dining Services, Aida Jane Doolittle is retiring this February, proudly brandishing bachelor’s degrees in sociology and labor relations that she has been working toward since 2005.
Doolittle’s story with Rutgers began in the mid 1970s. As a high-schooler growing up in Rutgers Village in New Brunswick, she took an entry-level job at Brower Commons on the College Avenue campus. After high school she started attending Rutgers in 1979 as a zoology major and said she enjoyed the opportunity of being an independent young adult that the college experience provides.
“Rutgers Village, it's where Route 1 and 18 meet," she said. "It’s still New Brunswick but it's sort of on the outside. When I was in high school we would ride our bikes to (the) college campus and pretend we were college kids and hang out. It was way different then.”
After spending two semesters at Rutgers, Doolittle decided to take a year off to better prepare herself for life at the University. She stayed working for Dining Services and said she hoped to return as a student once she settled in.
But, life took a different turn and she found herself welcoming her son and then a daughter into the world and putting her education plans on hold, she said.
Doolittle said she then spent her first years washing dishes before eventually working her way up into the bakery, where she handles many of the desserts, from eclairs to carrot cake — which Rutgers students enjoy in diners and shops all around campus.
Her favorite thing to do in the bakeshop is to decorate cakes, she said.
With young children to think about and other family obligations to attend to, Doolittle said she had little time to even entertain the thought of coming back to finish her education. In 2005, her youngest entered high school, and she was ready to pick up where she left off. Though she first entered Rutgers as a zoology major, approximately 25 years later she took classes focused on sociology, labor relations and psychology.
Working part-time, she juggled her responsibilities as a mother, a baker and a student for 13 years, before graduating in 2015. She and her daughter received their degrees together — Doolittle received two bachelor's degrees and her daughter received a master's degree in social work.
“We were actually out on the same field together and I shouted ‘Hey Cheyenne!’ and she shouted ‘Hey Mom!’ and we waved to each other on the field," Doolittle said. "So we had a joint graduation party at Donaldson Park.”
Doolittle has 77 working days left until she retires. Unless she finds work in another department of Rutgers, she said she will move on to the next phase of her life. The baker hopes to return to the University part-time in the spring to finish her master’s degree in labor relations from the School of Management and Labor Relations.
After Rutgers, Doolittle said she wants to look into becoming a substitute teacher.
She said it fits well into her her part-time study plans and her prolific traveling and hiking endeavors. She has visited 38 states and hopes to see them all, starting with Wisconsin next.
“I took four weeks off one year and me and my kids went camping in forests and deserts and all that, all the way to California and back," she said. "We take one trip up to the Canadian border every year and this week I went to Alaska with my niece.”
As she leaves, Doolittle is the last woman working full-time in the Rutgers bakeshop. She is also a confidential sexual violence advocate through the Middlesex Board of Health where she operates the hotline and accompanies survivors to forensic exams, police reporting and court dates. She said that it is a hard but important job.
In her 42 years of working at Rutgers, Doolittle has seen much change. The buildings, shops and roads all change but in her mind it is the student body that has remained the same in all but size at least, she said.
“Buildings, that all has changed and grown you know. But kids? Kids are still kids,” Doolittle said.
