Tag Archives: #english

Quotable

Quote

“The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough… Given the ragged magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once?”

-Mark Edmundson

“The Ideal English Major”, Chronicle of Higher Education

A professor of mine at school sent me an article today called “The Ideal English Major.” Mark Edmundson writes beautifully, and this was my favorite quote. Ragged magnificence. Here is the link: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Ideal-English-Major/140553/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

My Fictional Resume

Standard

I have a love-hate relationship with resumes. 

I hate writing them. I love taking them to Career Services people, mostly because they make me sound way more important than I make myself sound. Which is kind of funny, because it they are the opposite of the Overly-Involved people I wrote about in my first post: https://auroramorgan.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/hello-world/ These career counselors are paid to try to make me sound awesome and help me get a job, so instead of saying things like “why did you do this to yourself?” they say things like “oh, I can work with this” and in one beautiful bullet-point, they tell society (by which I mean employers) that I am valuable (by which I mean hireable).

This is how my experiences at my school’s Career Development Center usually go:

1. I bring in a resume that I’ve been working on for a week, all formatted and concise, and sit down in a self-satisfied way in one of the not-at-all-comfortable chairs in the waiting area. 

2. I have to fill out a sheet like I’m at the doctor’s or the DMV that says why I’m there and what materials I have brought with me, then I give it to the receptionist and wait some more. Even though there is no one else there.  (I think this is so that senior counselors don’t get stuck doing tasks they deem silly. “She’s here for a resume check? Give her to the intern please, I have much more important things to do!”)

3. When I am deemed worthy to be seen, I go to a little table and present my resume. TA DA! Then I sit there, bemused and amused, while the counselor takes her pencil and proceeds to cross out 90% of what I’ve written, change my margins, and tell me my font is awful. (I didn’t know a font could be awful… except maybe Wingdings or something, because then the employer wouldn’t be able to read it… it’s not like I’m writing my resumes in Edwardian Script or Curlz MT! Or Goudy Stout, which isn’t actually that bad, I just wanted to say Goudy Stout.)

4. She rewrites everything, and hands it over to me, as if I’m going to say “nope, I sound too good, erase it all!” No, I keep my cool, and I pretend that her magical powers of phrasing and spatial manipulation have not awed me. (You would think, being an English major, that I could just do this no problem, but I’ve never been very good at describing myself, much less in limited space. See the “About” section for what my resume would look like if I was allowed to write it the way I wanted.)

5. I pack up my things, clutching the revised resume like it’s my own personal Golden Fleece. I always have this weird compulsion to bow and say “thank you for your counsel,” but thankfully I haven’t succumbed to that yet, otherwise I would probably never come back. 

Maybe their pencils are like Rita Skeeter’s green quill, where no matter what you say it comes out different… “I’m an English major.” “No, my dear, you are a literature aficionado with a specialty in Postcolonial Studies or Victorian linguistics.” That’s totally not on my resume, but you get the idea. 

The point of this is that I have an internship this summer, and need to update my resume. The other point of this is that while at my internship DOING LOTS OF WORK AND PAYING SO MUCH ATTENTION, the friend that I mentioned last post, Michelle, sent me an interesting draft of my fictional resume. I find that the “Skills” section at the end of resumes is the worst, because if you only know Microsoft Word, Excel (which all of you know I am GREAT at), and Outlook, it seems a little bare. I puff my section up by adding things like “event planning” and “student leadership” and “fundraising” because I am on student government and am a Resident Assistant at my school (yep, classic overachiever and super involved. It’s a sickness.). These are quasi-skills that sound like I know what I’m doing, but if I put “I had an event about Being Safe Off Campus or about International Women’s Day or I Made Cupcakes For My Floor” then no one would take me seriously. (A lot of these actually do take planning and budgeting, etc. so I’m not lying… I just don’t know Photoshop or Mathematica or InDesign… KEEPING PEOPLE SAFE AND BAKING CAN BE SKILLS TOO)

To Michelle, this is what my “Skills” section should be: 

Image

(It’s all true.)

Although I don’t know if she meant that I am King Arthur and Peter Pan, or just that I know a lot about them… 

I can name so many fictional worlds where my “Skills” would be invaluable… WHY EARTH, WHY?

I was tempted to print this out, but then I realized that, given my luck and propensity for ridiculous circumstances, I would accidentally give it to someone from whom I wanted a paying position. Fictional yet awesome resume + actual employer = disaster. Unless they, too, were awesome and somehow found it endearing that I carried around gag resumes.