“It’s grunt work, at first,” she says. “There’s no way I would be doing it, at least not past this year, if I knew that I wouldn’t have a chance to be promoted.”

Dorm Crew employees start out at $10.45 an hour, with the opportunity to earn $10.95 an hour after one year, and $11.10 an hour after three semesters. Captains and trial captains make $11.35 an hour.

Besides the high pay and opportunity for promotion, working for Dorm Crew seemed almost an ideal commitment for Beltran because of the flexible hours.

“I make my own hours, I can clean whenever I want, whenever I have time,” Beltran says.

Time management is key for Beltran, who divides her time between rehearsals with the Radcliffe Choral Society (five hours a week) and Mariachi Veritas (six hours a week), meeting with the freshman committee of the Catholic Student Association (one hour a week), as well as squeezing in five hours a week for her other job, serving lunch at the Signet Society.

Beltran is not the only student who insists that the process of cleaning out a stranger’s bathroom is relatively painless in light of the perks of the job.

“Dorm Crew has got to be the most flexible job on the planet, or at least, here at Harvard,” says Stefan A. Zebrowski-Rubin ’08, who was working six to 10 hours a week for Dorm Crew before he was hired for Let’s Go and quit. “Come in when you can. Do you as many hours as you can. It’s really up to you.”

But it was exactly that openness to the job that repelled Michael I. Levin-Gesundheit ’08.

“Without a set schedule, I found it very hard to make myself clean bathrooms,” says Levin-Gesundheit, a former wet worker—one who cleans bathrooms—who worked only two days before looking for another job that, as he says, wouldn’t require him to take a shower afterward. Despite considering custodial work to be “an important skill” and wanting to learn, Levin-Gesundheit wound up behind a library desk.

Dorm Crew workers say they have found that they are working against somewhat of a stigma.

Jordan C. Ford ’08, who will also serve as a trial captain at Spring Clean-Up, says that the worst aspect of Dorm Crew is “having to explain to people back home that I clean bathrooms for a living.”

Zebrowski-Rubin agrees that the day-to-day experience of Dorm Crew employees can be somewhat raw.

“When everything else is so sugar-coated with Harvard-ness, Dorm Crew just sort of slaps you in the face a little. We’re cleaning bathrooms, there’s no way around it,” Zebrowski-Rubin says.

However, Beltran says she realized before she got involved in Dorm Crew that the job wouldn’t be glamorous.

“I never thought I’d be cleaning bathrooms, let alone like it, but I actually get a lot of satisfaction from it that I don’t think I would personally get from a library job,” Beltran says.